Poet, Novelist, Essayist, Editor

Jill Bialosky's newest memoir is Poetry Will Save Your Life. She is the author of four acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently The Players; three critically acclaimed novels, most recently, The Prize, and a New York Times bestselling memoir History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, O Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and Paris Review among others. She co-edited with Helen Schulman the anthology, Wanting a Child. She is an Executive Editor and Vice President at W. W. Norton & Company. In 2014 she was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to poetry.

Poetry Will Save Your Life

In Poetry Will Save Your Life, poet, novelist, and New York Times bestselling author Jill Bialosky takes a wholly original approach to memoir, refracting her life through the prism of poems that have shaped, inspired, and helped her make sense of the world around her. At once highly personal and marked by keenly observed universal themes, Bialosky’s probing exploration touches on both familiar poetic classics and lesser-known gems that have had special significance.

“A lovely hybrid that blends [Bialosky’s] coming-of-age story with engaging literary analysis. … Adults and mature teens will find much to love in this book, which demonstrates how poems can become an integral part of life. It also suggests, on every page, the wisdom and deep compassion that make [Bialosky’s book] a tremendous asset both to readers and other writers.”
—The Washington Post

“Bialosky provides a refreshing tonic to the periodic, exaggerated and self-indulgent reports of poetry's death, difficulty or irrelevance…she takes the genre's worth as a given and leaps joyfully into sharing her admiration of the art form…thanks to Bialosky's erudite and instructive approach to poetry itself, you'll probably want to start your own scrapbook of lifesaving poems by the time you're through.”
— Kathleen Rooney, Chicago Tribune

“An executive editor at W.W. Norton, Bialosky’s own poems are precise, spare and emotionally acute. She writes memoir scenes with a poet’s eye, recalling the immediate sensations of childhood: three little girls building a snowman, ‘licking the rusty taste of snow from our mittens.’ She grieves her father, who died when she was 2, and chronicles the loneliness of her widowed mother, alone in Midwest suburbia with three daughters. Sharon Olds’ poem ‘The Sisters of Sexual Treasure’ clarifies Bialosky’s own erotic awakening, a charged encounter in a blue Corvette. Later, Lucille Clifton and Adrienne Rich help her to hone her ambition and challenge the myth of female sacrifice… Bialosky is at her best when writing about Plath — that ‘heightened and intense awareness of the evolving self.’ Plath’s poems shed light on the miracle of new motherhood and distill meaning from the horror of her younger sister’s suicide.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“unusual and affecting…using 51 poems, ranging broadly from nursery rhymes to a Shakespeare sonnet, [Bialosky] sets out to demonstrate how reading and remembering poetry can provide a kind of salvation…Like the weather and politics, the human condition isn’t altered by poetry, but this lovely memoir poignantly and credibly shows how it can inspire our acceptance of life.”
—Hilma Wolitzer, East Hampton Star

“Bialosky, a poet and novelist, sees her life broken up not by years, but through poems. Her moving memoir …. shows how poetry can be a powerful tool to for healing and understanding.”
—Real Simple

“An emotional, sometimes-wrenching account of how lines of poetry can be lifelines.”
—Kirkus

“An intimate rendering of a poet's passion for words.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“This is the only textbook 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 Bialosky’s life so intimate that every passage feels like a private gift, tenderly crafted for the reader’s memory, to be cherished for years to come.”
—Hope Jahren, bestselling author of Lab Girl

“Poetry Will Save Your Life is one of the most moving memoirs I’ve ever read, but it’s 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.”
—Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club and Books for Living

“Time and again she proves her thesis of survival through the arts. But it is not a work of an essayist but one of a person who believes in the power of art to connect us in our shared humanity.”
—New York Journal of Books

Poetry Will Save Your Life

Read an excerpt of Poetry Will Save Your Life on the Poetry Foundation website

A Window Opens

How poetry offers a new way of seeing.

The Prize

“The Prize is a subtle, incisive, and erotically charged exploration of the dark crossroad where art, money, and obsession converge. Jill Bialosky has written a true and dangerous novel.”
  —John Banville, author of The Sea

The Players

The strongest collection yet from this widely praised poet is about the central players in our lives, our relationships over time — between mother and son, mother and daughter-and how one generation of relationships informs and shapes the next.

History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life

New York Times Bestseller

“Extraordinarily useful... a source of solace and understanding. [Bialosky’s] hand is always skillful, as attentive to the rhythms of storytelling as to conveying emotion.” 
—Time

“Valiant and eloquent... Bialosky’s thoughtful book elucidates the complexity of suicide.”
 —Washington Post Book World

Intruder

Finalist in the  2009 Paterson Poetry Prize.

“These poems show both a storyteller’s gift for implicit narrative and a sophisticate’s sense of other arts ... Bialosky’s book ends up undeniably personal, confirming her in her most serious of all her vocations: the setting down of a tumultuous inner life into clear, shared words.” 
—Publishers Weekly

The Life Room

“[A] suspenseful tale of Eleanor's relationship with the magazine hack. Through him, Bialosky explores the idea that needy people are often the most powerful and destabilizing. We’re not sure why Eleanor wants to have an affair with him, but we believe she does — and with a kind of reckless illogic that would do Tolstoy proud.” 
—New York Times Book Review

House Under Snow

“This artful first novel by the poet and editor Jill Bialosky is a quiet stepsister to Rick Moody's The Ice Storm.”
 — New York Times Book Review

“An elegiac novel of a father's sudden death and its lingering effect on the family he leaves behind.” 
— The Washington Post

Subterranean

Finalist for the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

Jill Bialosky follows her acclaimed debut collection, The End of Desire, with this powerful sequence of poems that probes the subterranean depths of eros. Gerald Stern has called Bialosky “the poet of the secret garden, the place, at once, of grace and sadness,” and here she enters that garden again, blending the classical with the contemporary in bold considerations of desire, fertility, virginity, and childbirth.