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The Blessing: A Memoir

10 best books like The Blessing: A Memoir (Gregory Orr): A Hundred White Daffodils, On Poetry, Answering Back: Living Poets Reply to the Poetry of the Past, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, Poetry and the Age, Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters, Plant Dreaming Deep, The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg

A Hundred White Daffodils
AuthorJane Kenyon
ISBN1555973086
In A Hundred White Daffodils - an enlightening and typically endearing collection of prose and poetry - the late author of five highly regarded books of verse reflects on her writing life, growing spirituality, passionate hobbies, and ultimately fatal struggle with leukemia. Jane Kenyon is one of...
On Poetry
AuthorGlyn Maxwell
ISBN1849430853
A collection of short essays and reflections on poetry from the acclaimed British poet Glyn Maxwell. These essays illustrates Maxwell’s poetic philosophy, that the greatest verse arises from a harmony of mind and body, and that poetic forms originate in human necessities – breath, heartbeat,...
Answering Back: Living Poets Reply to the Poetry of the Past
AuthorCarol Ann Duffy
ISBN0330448234
I'm not a big reader of poetry, but I'm
glad I read this, both for the opportunity to revisit poems by A.E. Housman, W.H. Auden, Christina Rossetti, Ben Jonson, and D.H. Lawrence (who knew he had a sense of humour?), but also to see how contemporary poets have responded to their predecessors. I particularly...
Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years
AuthorDiane di Prima
ISBN0140231587
In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Born into a conservative Italian American family, di Prima grew up in Brooklyn but broke away from her roots to follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she...
Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time
AuthorEavan Boland
ISBN0393314375
[O]ver a relatively short time--certainly no more than a generation or two--women have moved from being the subjects and objects of Irish poems to being the authors of them. It is a momentous transit. It is also a disruptive one. . . . What is more, such a transit . . . is almost invisible to the naked eye....
The Widening Spell of the Leaves
AuthorLarry Levis
ISBN0822954540
For my money, this is Levis' best book. I admit there are times when I fluctuate between it and Elegy, which seems to be most people's favorite. But the longer sequence in this book, "The Perfection of Solitude," is one of the most sincere, confounding, and ambitious explorations into the lyric Levis...
Poetry and the Age
AuthorRandall Jarrell
ISBN0813021081
About Poetry and the Age:

"Perhaps the most comprehensive and certainly the most detailed of all studies of modern poetry."-- Delmore Schwartz, New York Times Book Review

"Randall Jarrell’s book about poetry and the criticism of poetry pulls the bung-cork out of the barrel. The...
Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters
AuthorAmy Andrews
ISBN0829438319
When Amy Andrews and Jessica Mesman Griffith met in a creative writing class in graduate school, they both confessed to writing about God. They bonded one night while reading the Book of Ruth and came to truly understand the unlikely friendship of Ruth and Naomi. In these two Old Testament women, they...
Plant Dreaming Deep
AuthorMay Sarton
Plant Dreaming Deep is a memoir of writer May Sarton's first ten years in her first home in Nelson, NH.

I first read this book when in my twenties and in full stride as an ex-urbanite in the deep north woods of Minnesota. I felt a deep kinship with Ms. Sarton, even then, yet what a different perspective...
The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg
AuthorPaul Portuges
ISBN0915520176
The first major full-length study of the most famous poet of our time, this insightful book is drawn from unlimited access to Ginsberg's papers as well as conversations with the poet. A fascinating and coherent presentation of some of the largely unknown facts about Ginsberg's background as a poet,...
A Private History of Awe
AuthorScott Russell Sanders
ISBN0865477345
An original and searching memoir from "one of America's finest essayists" (Phillip Lopate)

When Scott Russell Sanders was four, his father held him in his arms during a thunderstorm, and he felt awe--"the tingle of a power that surges through bone and rain and everything." He says, "The search...
Autumn Journal
AuthorLouis MacNeice
ISBN0571197450


“September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already
So many of its days intolerable...
4 Dada Suicides: Selected Texts of Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma, and Jacques Vaché
AuthorJacques Vaché
ISBN0947757740
This book collects together works by four "writers" on the fringes of the Dada movement in 1920's Paris. These four took the nihilism of the movement to its ultimate conclusion, their works are remnants of lives lived to the limit and then cast aside with nonchalance and abandon: Vache died of a drug overdose,...
Intimate Journals
AuthorCharles Baudelaire
ISBN0486447782
One of the most influential French poets of the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was also an important art critic and translator. In fact, his translations of Edgar Allan Poe's works are considered classics of French prose. Throughout much of his life, however, Baudelaire was...
The Los Angeles Diaries: A Memoir
AuthorJames Brown
ISBN0060521511
A wrenching chronicle of loss and
reaffirmation from novelist James Brown Plagued by the suicides of both his siblings, heir to alcohol and drug abuse, divorce and economic ruin, James Brown lived a life clouded by addiction, broken promises and despair. In The Los Angeles Diaries he reveals his...
I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
AuthorPatricia Hampl
ISBN0393320316
In this timely gathering, Patricia Hampl, one of our most elegant practitioners, "weaves personal stories and grand ideas into shimmering bolts of prose" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) as she explores the autobiographical writing that has enchanted or bedeviled her. Subjects engaging Hampl's attention...
The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere
AuthorDebra Marquart
ISBN1582433453
I grow tired of reading memoirs, since it's the quick and easy way to publish for tenure-hungry academics. But Marquart does something here that is unique, carefully tiptoeing self-indulgence for the greater ideas of history, legacy, land and place. Her history weaves with the landscape, with the...
The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again
AuthorSven Birkerts
ISBN1555974961
The Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of sustained examinations...
The Virgin of Bennington
AuthorKathleen Norris
Shy and sheltered as a young woman, Kathleen Norris wasn't prepared for the sex, drugs, and bohemianism of Bennington College in the late 1960s—and when she moved to New York City after graduation, it was a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. In this chronicle, Norris remembers the education...
Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary
AuthorHugo Ball
ISBN0520204409
Hugo Ball—poet, philosopher, novelist, cabaret performer, journalist, mystic—was a man extremely sensitive to the currents of his time and carried in their wake. In February 1916 he founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The sound poems and performance art by Ball and the other artists who...
The Exact Place: a memoir
AuthorMargie L. Haack
ISBN1937063984
A three-room house in northern Minnesota with no running water can seem crowded with a mother, stepfather, five siblings, and a dog. It was swampland barely claimed from wilderness, where temperatures of 40 below could freeze a chicken house full of hens. It was the place Margie accidentally killed...
Baudelaire
AuthorJean-Paul Sartre
ISBN0811201899
Sartre offers the reader a peering and somewhat brutal examination of Baudelaire. Less a critical reading of the author's work than a Freudian biography adorned by existential themes--billowing with pessimistic grace. Baudelaire's dandyism, his fomenting of self-ridicule and humiliation,...
The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright
AuthorLeslie Marmon Silko
ISBN0915308746
This moving, eighteen-month exchange of correspondence chronicles the friendship-through-the-mail of two extraordinary writers.
Leslie Marmon Silko is a poet and novelist. James Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his "Collected Poems." They met only twice. First, briefly, in 1975,...
Letters To Yesenin
AuthorJim Harrison
ISBN0912090332
"The way Harrison has embedded his entire vision of our predicament implicitly in the particulars of two poetic lives, his own and Yesenin's, is what makes the poem not only his best but one of the best in the past twenty-five years of American writing."-Hayden Carruth, Sulfur"Harrison inhabits the...
Ghostbread
AuthorSonja Livingston
ISBN0820333980
“When you eat soup every night, thoughts of bread get you through.” Ghostbread makes real for us the shifting homes and unending hunger that shape the life of a girl growing up in poverty during the 1970s.One of seven children brought up by a single mother, Sonja Livingston was raised in areas of western...
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