Bialosky - Poetry will save your life: a memoir

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Advance Praise for Poetry Will Save Your Life

This is the only book you will ever need on poetry. It tells you not only how to read poetry, but why to read it, lovingly illustrated by portraits from Bialoskys life so intimate that every passage feels like a private gift, tenderly crafted for the readers memory, to be cherished for years to come.

Hope Jahren, author of Lab Girl

Poetry Will Save Your Life is one of the most moving memoirs Ive ever read, but its so much more. Bialosky does something miraculous: as she shares stories from her life, she shows how specific poems can help all of us make sense of our own lives and the world. Here are classic and contemporary poems that help us see and hear one another more clearly; that speak to us in times of loss and grief; that guide us through our every days. If youve always loved poetry, this book will captivate you. And if you want to love poetry, then this book will open worlds. Poetry Will Save Your Life is itself a life-saving book.

Will Schwalbe, author of The End of Your Life Book Club and Books for Living

Poetry Will Save Your Life is a remarkable and compulsively readable book, one that combines the poignant moments of lived life and the reflected life of words in a wholly original way. Jill Bialosky writes with as much pristine skill about her personal story as she writes about the poems that nurtured and inspired her. The intersection of art and life has rarely been so vividly rendered.

Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy

This charming and captivating book ties each moment of the authors development to the transformative verses she read. She allows these poems to organize her deliberate candor about a complex and compelling life.

Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree

Jill Bialosky writes with a sincerity that would have made Dickinson herself weep. She fights to keep poetry from being lofty and academic; she takes it out of the clouds and brings [it] down to earth. Having an expert guide you to a subject with the humility and enthusiasm of a beginner is as moving as her prose, in which she reminds us that she has also been a woman who needed saving, and poetry swept in and gave her back a pulse. She achieves something remarkable in that it feels as though she is revealing herself for our sake, the readers: basically, what all the best poetry strives for.

Mary-Louise Parker, author of Dear Mr. You

Empathic, wise, humane, and consoling, Poetry Will Save Your Life is an engrossing celebration of poetry for any curious reader. Bialosky tells us about the poems that have kept her company over the yearsand along the way, she joyfully illuminates both poetry and life itself.

Meghan ORourke, author of The Long Goodbye

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Copyright 2017 by Jill Bialosky

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First Atria Books hardcover edition August 2017

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Interior design by Michelle Marchese

Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral Design

Jacket photograph Tamara Staples

Back jacket photograph Udovichenko/Shutterstock

Author photograph Beowulf Sheehan

Names: Bialosky, Jill, author.

Title: Poetry will save your life : a memoir / by Jill Bialosky.

Description: First Atria Books hardcover edition. | New York : Atria Books, 2017. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016056306 (print) | LCCN 2017015404 (ebook) | ISBN 9781451693218 (eBook) | ISBN 9781451693201 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Bialosky, Jill. | Poets, American--20th century--Biography. | American poetry--21st century. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | POETRY / Anthologies (multiple authors). | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / General.

Classification: LCC PS3552.I19 (ebook) | LCC PS3552.I19 Z46 2017 (print) | DDC 811/.54 [B] --dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056306

ISBN 978-1-4516-9320-1

ISBN 978-1-4516-9321-8 (ebook)

For my mother, Iris Yvonne Bialosky

ALSO BY JILL BIALOSKY

NONFICTION

History of a Suicide

FICTION

The Prize

The Life Room

House Under Snow

POETRY

The Players

Intruder

Subterranean

The End of Desire

Anthology

Wanting a Child (coedited with Helen Schulman)

What is poetry which does not save Nations or people?

from Dedication by Czesaw Miosz

I fell in love with poetry when my fourth grade teacher, Miss Hudson, read us Robert Frosts The Road Not Taken. Ive memorized that poem, and often, when Im at a crossroadsboth literally and metaphoricallythe lines come to me. Since then, other poems have become guideposts. When it begins to snow, I think of Wallace Stevens and The Snow Man and the line one must have a mind of winter. Ive said that line frequently enough in my head that it has become a part of me. When Im slightly down or feeling overlooked, I think of Emily Dickinsons Im Nobody and smile at my lapse into self-pity. When Im perplexed by how someone has behaved, I remember T. S. Eliots humankind cannot bear very much reality. When Im suffering a loss or heartbreak, I think of Elizabeth Bishops The art of losing isnt hard to master, and its sly irony makes me feel less alone.

Stand by a window at night on the middle floor of a high-rise in an urban city and watch the lights go on and off in the apartment buildings across the street. Each building contains a set of mini compartments, and in each compartment resides a person... or perhaps a man and a woman, or college roommates. A family with young children. Or an elderly person and her aide. A pair of lovers. Some of the windows are easier to see through and others are more opaque. In each small compartment, people tend to their daily rituals. They make love, drink, eat, and sleep. Curled into the cushions on a couch, they cry from bereavement or a broken heart. Or out of loneliness. Sometimes, on a hot day when the windows are open, you can hear strangers arguing or laughing. In these rooms, babies are conceived; people get sick and even die; someone might take his own life. Imagine in each of these small spaces, poems are taking shape, poems written from the experiences that occur inside and outside those rooms. Experiences that are both common and unique and a part of everyday living. Poems are made from the lives lived, borne out of experiences and shaped by solitary thought. Like a map to an unknown city, a poem might lead you toward an otherwise unreachable experience; but once youve reached it, you recognize it immediately.