Red Comet

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
by Heather Clark
Knopf Publishing Group, 2020
Hardcover, 1152 pages

The highly anticipated new biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials--including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews--Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, Massachusetts who had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s.

Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Plath's world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a marriage of true minds that would change the course of poetry in English; and much more.

Max Jacob

Max Jacob
A Life in Art and Letters
by Rosanna Warren
Norton, 2021 ISBN: 978-0-393-07885-5


A comprehensive and moving biography of Max Jacob, a brilliant cubist poet who lived at the margins of fame.

More than thirty years in the making, this landmark biography offers a compelling, tragic portrait of Jacob as a man and as an artist alongside a rich study of his groundbreaking poetry—in Warren’s own stunning translations. Max Jacob is a nuanced, deeply researched, and essential contribution to Modernist scholarship.

James Wright: A Life in Poetry

James Wright
A Life in Poetry
by Jonathan Blunk

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2017
ISBN: 9780374178598
512 Pages

The authorized and sweeping biography of one of America’s most complex, influential, and enduring poets

In the extraordinary generation of American poets who came of age in the middle of the twentieth century, James Wright (1927–1980) was frequently placed at the top of the list. With a fierce, single-minded devotion to his work, Wright escaped the steel town of his Depression-era childhood in the Ohio valley to become a revered professor of English literature and a Pulitzer Prize winner. But his hometown remained at the heart of his work, and he courted a rough, enduring muse from his vivid memories of the Midwest. A full-throated lyricism and classical poise became his tools, honesty and unwavering compassion his trademark.

Using meticulous research, hundreds of interviews, and Wright’s public readings, Jonathan Blunk’s authorized biography explores the poet’s life and work with exceptional candor, making full use of Wright’s extensive unpublished work—letters, poems, translations, and personal journals. Focusing on the tensions that forced Wright’s poetic breakthroughs and the relationships that plunged him to emotional depths, Blunk provides a spirited portrait, and a fascinating depiction of this turbulent period in American letters.

Available Light

Available Light: Philip Booth and the Gift of Place
(Bauhan Publishing Co., Peterborough, N.H., 2016, $23.95
by Jeanne Braham

Philip Booth published ten volumes of meticulously crafted lyric poems in his lifetime, most of them set in and inscribed by the landscapes and cadences of Down East Maine. Like other major poets writing from New England who were his contemporaries, the echoes of Robert Frost register in Booth’s structure and language. Booth knew Frost personally and if his mentor’s poetic example shaped Booth’s art, Castine, Maine, home of Booth’s maternal ancestors for five generations, provided “the gift of place”: the historic, geographic, and experiential canvas on which to paint his poems. This biography aims to ignite new interest in a poet who spent a “lifetime looking into how words see.”

Whole Harmonium

The Whole Harmonium
The Life of Wallace Stevens
By Paul Mariani

A perceptive, enlightening biography of one the most important American poets of the twentieth century—Wallace Stevens—as seen through his lifelong quest to find and describe the sublime in the human experience.

Wallace Stevens lived a richly imaginative life that found expression in his poetry. His philosophical questioning, spiritual depth, and brilliantly inventive use of language would be profound influences on poets as diverse as William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery. The Whole Harmonium presents Stevens within the living context of his times, as well as the creator of a poetry which has had a profound and lasting impact on the modern imagination itself.

Anything That Burns You

ANYTHING THAT BURNS YOU : A PORTRAIT OF LOLA RIDGE, RADICAL POET
By Terese Svoboda

Anything That Burns You is the first full-length biography of Lola Ridge, a trailblazer for women, poetry, and human rights. Terese Svoboda takes the reader on a fascinating journey that follows Ridge's life from her childhood as an Irish immigrant in the mining towns of New Zealand to her years as a budding poet and artist in Australia, and then to San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, where she flourished as a poet and editor of the avant-garde journals Others and Broom. By the 1920s, Ridge was at the center of modernism: good friends with William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, while promoting the careers of Hart Crane and Jean Toomer, in addition to writing brilliant socially critical poems. At one time considered one of the most popular poets of her day, Ridge later fell out of critical favor due to her impassioned verse that looked head-on at the major social woes of society, infused with a radical belief in freedom that she gleaned from her mentors Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger. Certain to revive the legacy of this unique artistic figure-as unforgettable as Virginia Woolf or Frida Kahlo-this lively portrait gives a veritable who's who of all the key players in the arts, literature, and radical politics of her time, in which Lola Ridge stood front and center.

To learn more about the author, visit http://www.teresesvoboda.com/

James Merrill: Life and Art

James Merrill
Life and Art
By Langdon Hammer

Langdon Hammer has given us the first biography of the poet James Merrill (1926–95), whose life is surely one of the most fascinating in American literature. Merrill was born to high privilege and high expectations as the son of Charles Merrill, the charismatic cofounder of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, and Hellen Ingram, a muse, ally, and antagonist throughout her son’s life. Wounded by his parents’ bitter divorce, he was the child of a broken home, looking for repair in poetry and love. This is the story of a young man escaping, yet also reenacting, the energies and obsessions of those powerful parents. It is the story of a gay man inventing his identity against the grain of American society during the eras of the closet, gay liberation, and AIDS. Above all, it is the story of a brilliantly gifted, fiercely dedicated poet working every day to turn his life into art.

Amy Lowell Anew

Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography
By Carl Rollyson

978-1-4422-2392-9 • Hardback
August 2013 • $34.00

978-1-4422-2394-3 • eBook
August 2013 • $33.99

Pages: 278

The controversial American poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925), a founding member of the Imagist group that included D. H. Lawrence and H. D., excelled as the impresario for the “new poetry” that became news across the U. S. in the years after World War I. Maligned by T. S. Eliot as the “demon saleswoman” of poetry, and ridiculed by Ezra Pound, Lowell has been treated by previous biographers as an obese, sex-starved, inferior poet who smoked cigars and made a spectacle of herself, canvassing the country on lecture tours that drew crowds in the hundreds for her electrifying performances.

In fact, Lowell wrote some of the finest love lyrics of the 20th century and led a full and loving life with her constant companion, the retired actress Ada Russell. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1926. This provocative new biography, the first in forty years, restores Amy Lowell to her full humanity in an era that, at last, is beginning to appreciate the contributions of gays and lesbians to American’s cultural heritage. Drawing on newly discovered letters and papers, Rollyson’s biography finally gives this vibrant poet her due.