"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...

This 1905 biography of the great American poet, written thirteen years after his death, was notable for the speculative introduction of a New Orleans romance between Whitman and a Creole woman, an affair that most biographers reject today. Still, Binns's volume remains one of the foundational books of Whitman scholarship, a book striving to tell of Whitman the man without placing a definite value on his work.

Brief biography of the New England farmer and teacher who became one of America's best known poets.

Jew Boy is Alan Kaufman's riveting memoir of being raised by a Jewish mother who survived the Holocaust. This pioneering masterpiece, the very first memoir of its kind by a member of the Second Generation is Kaufman's coming-of-age account, by turns hilarious and terrifying, written with irreverent humor and poetic introspection. Throughout the course of his memoir, Kaufman touches on the pain, guilt, and confusion that shape the lives and characters...

"In Catholic grade school, Emma Bolden has a strange, intimate experience with a teacher that unleashes a short-lived chronic coughing spell--something the medical establishment will later use against her, as she struggles through chronic pain and fainting spells that coincide with her menstrual cycle. With The Tiger and the Cage, Bolden uses her own experience as the starting point for a journey through the institutional misogyny of Western medicine--from...