" In THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD, Elizabeth Alexander--poet, mother, and wife--finds herself at an existential crossroads after the sudden death of her husband, who was just 49. Reflecting with gratitude on the exquisite beauty of her married life that was, grappling with the subsequent void, and feeling a re-energized devotion to her two teenage sons, Alexander channels her poetic sensibilities into a rich, lucid prose that describes a very personal and...

"A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy."--Dust jacket.

"An exquisite memoir about how to live--and love--every day with 'death in the room,' from poet Nina Riggs, mother of two young sons and the direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the tradition of When Breath Becomes Air. 'We are breathless, but we love the days. They are promises. They are the only way to walk from one night to the other.' Nina Riggs was just thirty-seven years old when initially diagnosed with breast cancer--one small spot....

"Hailed as a memoir of unexpected beauty and arresting power, Like Family tells the story of three young sisters who are abandoned by their mother and father and raised as wards of the Fresno County, California, court. McLain's unflinching recollection of being shuttled from foster home to foster home strikes a universal chord, capturing the loneliness, uncertainty, and odd pleasures that are the very nature of adolescence."--Back cover.

A tour de force of prose style, Holler is poet Danielle Chapman's moving and provocative portrait of her Southern, military childhood and an unflinching reckoning with what such an inheritance means now. A crucial book for anyone with a racial conscience in today's divided America, Holler is one woman's account of "the miraculous catastrophe" of being human in an inhumane world, and proof that it's possible to fully face who we are while searching...

Love Songs is a collective biography of nine American women poets who lived and wrote, primarily, in the first half of the twentieth century and were important in the emergence of New York City as the literary capital of the nation. They knew one another, and sometimes reviewed, criticized, and encouraged each other's work. The poems presented here are lyric poems, short song-like poems of many moods and forms, on many varied subjects -- relationships,...