In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City : the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.

"An alternatingly funny and poignant memoir from "our finest living example of [the American civic poet]" (New York Times). In late-1940s Long Branch, an historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighborhood of Italian, Black, and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate high-school...

From the author of American Bloomsbury, Louisa May Alcott, and Home Before Dark, 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. At the time of his death in 1962, at age sixty-eight, he was, after Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in the United States.
 
E. E. Cummings was and remains controversial. He has

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A picture-book biography of celebrated poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black person to win the Pulitzer Prize
A 2021 Coretta Scott King Book Award Illustrator Honor Book
A 2021 Robert F. Sibert Informational Honor Book
A 2021 Association of Library Service to Children Notable Children's Book

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) is known for her poems about "real life." She wrote about love, loneliness,...

From Mary Karr comes this gorgeously written, often hilarious story of her tumultuous teens and sexual coming-of-age. Picking up where the bestselling The Liars' Club left off, Karr dashes down the trail of her teen years with customary sass, only to run up against the paralyzing self-doubt of a girl in bloom. Fleeing the thrills and terrors of adolescence, she clashes against authority in all its forms and hooks up with an unforgettable band...

The author reveals how, shortly after giving birth to a child she adored, she drank herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide before a spiritual awakening led her to sobriety.

"An engrossing new biography of Sylvia Plath focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual growth and achievement, restoring the vivid creative woman behind the longtime Plath myths perpetuated by a pathology-based approach to her life and art. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark here brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, MA who had poetic ambition from a very young age, and was an accomplished, published...

May Sarton's bestselling memoir of a solitary year spent at the house she bought and renovated  "Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self." -May Sarton May Sarton's parrot chatters away as Sarton looks out the window at the rain and contemplates returning to her "real" life-not friends, not even love, but writing. In her bravest and most revealing memoir, Sarton casts her keenly observant eye on both the interior and exterior...

"For its twentieth anniversary, a stunning Graphic Deluxe Edition of Mary Karr's pathbreaking, award-winning, mega-bestselling memoir, with a new foreword by Lena Dunham When it was first published twenty years ago, The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious...

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...