Ebook: Poetry will save your life: a memoir

"An unconventional and inventive coming-of-age memoir organized around forty-three remarkable poems by poets such as Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath, from a critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author and poet. For Jill Bialosky, certain poems stand out like signposts at pivotal moments in a life: the death of a father, adolescence, first love, leaving home, the suicide of a sister, marriage, the birth of a child, the day in New York City the Twin Towers fell. As Bialosky narrates these moments, she illuminates the ways in which particular poems offered insight, compassion, and connection, and shows how poetry can be a blueprint for living. In Poetry Will Save Your Life, Bialosky recalls when she encountered each formative poem, and how its importance and meaning evolved over time, allowing new insights and perceptions to emerge. While Bialosky's personal stories animate each poem, they touch on many universal experiences, from the awkwardness of girlhood, to crises of faith and identity, from braving a new life in a foreign city to enduring the loss of a loved one, from becoming a parent to growing creatively as a poet and artist. In Poetry Will Save Your Life, Bialosky has crafted an engaging and entirely original examination of a life while celebrating the enduring value of poetry, not as a purely cerebral activity, but as a means of conveying personal experience and as a source of comfort and intimacy. In doing so she brilliantly illustrates the ways in which poetry can be an integral part of life itself and can, in fact, save your life"--;Preface -- Discovery: "The road not taken" by Robert Frost -- Danger: "We real cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks, "Richard Cory" by Edwin Arlington Robinson -- Wonder: "The star" by Jane Taylor and Ann Taylor -- Selfhood: "My shadow" by Robert Louis Stevenson, "The swing" by Robert Louis Stevenson -- Memory: "I wandered lonely as a cloud" by William Wordsworth -- Shame: "You and your whole race" by Langston Hughes, "I, too" by Langston Hughes -- Ancestors: Psalm 23: "The Lord is my shepherd" -- War: "My child blossoms sadly" by Yehuda Amichai -- Prayer: "Have you prayed?" by Li-Young Lee -- Imagination: "The snow man" by Wallace Stevens -- Death: "Stopping by woods on a snowy evening" by Robert Frost -- Poetry: "Ars poetica?" by Czeslaw Milosz -- Family: "January 1, 1965" by Joseph Brodsky, "Childhood" by Rainer Maria Rilke -- Fathers: "Those winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden -- Faith: "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" by Emily Dickinson, "I'm nobody! Who are you?" by Emily Dickinson, "'Hope' is the thing with feathers" by Emily Dickinson -- Foreboding: "My papa's waltz" by Theodore Roethke -- Depression: "Poppies in October" by Sylvia Plath -- Envy: Sonnet 29: "When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes" by William Shakespeare, "Confession" by Louise Gluck -- Sexuality: "The sisters of sexual treasure" by Sharon Olds -- Escape: "Sympathy" by Paul Laurence Dunbar -- First love: "Bright star" by John Keats, "A blessing" by James Wright -- Mothers: "My mother's feet" by Stanley Plumly -- Friendship: "Taking the hands" by Robert Bly, "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond" by E.E. Cummings -- Passion: "The red coal" by Gerald Stern, "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why" by Edna St. Vincent Millay, "The tropics in New York" by Claude McKay, "Heat" by Denis Johnson -- Legacy: "fury" by Lucille Clifton, "Diving into the wreck" by Adrienne Rich -- Marriage: "Song for the last act" by Louise Bogan -- Grief: "Musee des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden, "One art" by Elizabeth Bishop -- Suicide: "Tulips" by Sylvia Plath, "Waking in the blue" by Robert Lowell -- Motherhood: "The pomegranate" by Eavan Boland, "On my first son" by Ben Jonson, "Funeral blues" by W.H. Auden, "Nick and the candlestick" by Sylvia Plath -- Terror: "Try to praise the mutilated world" by Adam Zagajewski -- Mortality: "The child is father to the man" by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "My heart leaps up" by William Wordsworth -- Mystery: "Teachers" by W.S. Merwin, "Youth" by W.S. Merwin.