A hilarious and moving memoir--in the spirit of Anne Lamott and Nora Ephron--about a woman who returns home to her close-knit Mennonite family after a personal crisis.

"The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award-winning poet"-- "Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. Her forceful, uncompromising writing has more than stood the test of time, and the life of the woman behind the words is equally impressive. Motivated by personal revelations, Rich transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric...

"In the first biography of Longfellow in almost fifty years, Charles C. Calhoun seeks to solve a mystery: Why has one of America's most famous writers fallen into such oblivion? Can we truly understand nineteenth-century America if we ignore someone whose words were on everyone's lips - and who even today remains, in Dana Gioia's words, "the one poet average, non-bookish American's still know by heart"?" "Drawing on unpublished Longfellow family papers,...

"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...

"Nora May French and Carrie Sterling arrive at Carmel-by-the-Sea at the turn of the 20th century with dramatically different ambitions. Nora, a stunning, brilliant, impulsive writer in her early twenties, seeks artistic recognition and bohemian refuge among the most celebrated counter-culturalists of the era. Carrie, long-suffering wife of the poet George Sterling, wants the opposite: a semblance of the stability she thought her advantageous marriage...

"When Juan Felipe Herrera was very young, he picked flowers, helped his mama feed the chickens, slept under the starry sky, and learned to say goodbye to his amiguitos each time his migrant family moved on. When he grew up, Juan Felipe Herrera became a poet. His breathtaking poem "Imagine" and Lauren Castillo's evocative illustrations will speak to every reader and dreamer searching for this place in life."--Jacket.

"Here is Whitman the sage, champion of expansiveness and human freedom. Here too, is the poet's more personal side--his vivid memories of Thoreau, Emerson, and Lincoln, his literary judgments of writers such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tolstoy, and his expressions of hope in the democratic promise of the nation he loved. The result is a keepsake edition to touch the soul, capturing the distilled wisdom of America's greatest poet"--from Jacket.

"Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How...