Jill Bialosky

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...

"This book-length poem by the critically acclaimed poet is a seeker's story, revealing personal and historical traumas and how we search for understanding and meaning in their wake. In Asylum, poet Jill Bialosky embarks on a Virgilian journey, building a narrative from 103 elegant short poems and prose sections that cohere in their intensity and their need to explore darkness and sustenance both. Taken together, these piercing understated pieces--about...

"Cleveland is a working-class town, though its great institutions were founded by twentieth-century robber barons and magnates . . . It's this mix of the wealthy and the working class that makes this city--an urban center of brick and girders surrounded by verdant suburbs--a perfect backdrop for lawlessness. Cleveland has certainly seen its share of high-profile crime. Eliot Ness, Cleveland's director of public safety in the 1930s, hunted unsuccessfully...