A hilarious and moving memoir--in the spirit of Anne Lamott and Nora Ephron--about a woman who returns home to her close-knit Mennonite family after a personal crisis.

A bilingual collection of poems by Susan Gardner that explore the complexities of human nature and the natural environment.

Poems on love and the family. In The Planned Child, she writes: "I hated the fact that they planned me ... made a chart of the month and put / her temperature on it, rising and falling, / to know the day to make me -- I would have / liked to have been conceived in heat, / in haste, by mistake, in love, in sex, / not on cardboard, the little x on the / rising line that did not fall again."

"Life, like a poem, is a series of choices." In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman's personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist...

"Poets of the twentieth century Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that 'Elizabeth had more talent for life--and for poetry--than anyone else I've known.' This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters--a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America's most beloved and celebrated poets. In Love...

Blending daguerreotypes, paintings, manuscripts, excerpts from Dickinson's letters, and readings from nearly a dozen of her poems, this program presents the biography of one of America's most unique and influential voices in poetry.

Why do dogs speak so profoundly to our inner lives? When poet Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for his dying partner, he finds himself bringing home Beau, a large golden retriever, malnourished and in need of loving care. Beau joins Arden, the black retriever, to complete their family. As Beau bounds back into life, the two dogs become Doty's intimate companions, his solace, and eventually the very life force that keeps him from abandoning...

A major reassessment of the life and work of the novelist, painter, and playwright considered to be one of America's preeminent twentieth-century poets. Cummings was and remains controversial--called "a master" or "hideous." In Susan Cheever's rich biography we see his idyllic childhood years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his sternly religious father and his loving, attentive mother. We see Cummings--slight, agile, playful, a product of a nineteenth-century...