E Jill Bialosky030317 074 Beowulf Sheehan

Poet, Novelist, Essayist, Editor

Jill Bialosky's newest volume of poetry is Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections. She is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry, three critically acclaimed novels, most recently, The Prize, and a two memoirs, Poetry Will Save Your Life and 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.

Asylum

This book-length sequence 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 sequence from 103 elegant poems and prose sections that cohere in their intensity and their need to explore darkness and sustenance both. Taken together, these piercing pieces–about her nascent calling as a writer; her sister’s suicide and its still unfolding aftermath; the horror unleashed by World War II; the life cycle of the Monarch butterfly; and the woods where she seeks asylum–form a moving story, powerfully braiding despair, survival, and hope. Bialosky considers the oppositions that govern us: our reason and unreason, our need to preserve and destruct. “What are words when they meet the action of what they attempt to modify?” she asks, exploring the possible salve of language in the face of pain and grief. What Asylum delivers is a form of hard-won grace and an awareness of the cost of extreme violence, inexplicable loss, and the miraculous cycles of life, in work that carries Bialosky’s art to a new level of urgency and achievement.

Haunted by her sister’s suicide and by political and environmental collapse, Bialosky finds refuge in nature and language, all the ways “the mind seeks / to keep itself from torture.”
— New York Times Book Review

“Asylum’s form—a hybrid, nonlinear series of numbered, untitled lyric poems and fragments—gives Bialosky’s lyric instincts a more epic platform, allowing her to play daringly and inquisitively with time and place . . . By turns symphonic, operatic, Dantean, intimate, timeless, and mythic, this quietly ambitious project is very much a book for the autumn of 2020.”
—Lisa Russ Spaar, Los Angeles Review of Books

As we grapple with a new normal, Jill Bialosky’s poetry might be the anecdote we all need. Her new book ASYLUM, a compilation of prose and poetry, evokes despair, survival — and most importantly, hope.
— Katie Couric, Wake Up Call

“Few can distill the complex texture of grief and loss as Bialosky has so thoughtfully done in this collection. It is as if her collection is telling us that the only way through grief is found through forgiveness and by realizing we are not the first to walk this treacherous path and survive.”
—Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Green Mountains Review

“The elegiac fifth collection from Bialosky transcends genre, weaving tragedy, language, and perception in a poignant work of personal and public exploration . . . Here she explores language as an all-encompassing source of longing, consolation, redemption, and preservation . . . Erudite and devastating, Bialosky’s timely collection reverberates with a rare empathy and resilience.”
—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

“This graceful, spiraling, often elegiac, always vivid book-length meditation casts shifting light on family, self, and the drama of the living world. Whatever is illuminated, so precisely, so gracefully, is also shadowed. [Bialosky’s] touch is light yet trenchant, her cadence entrancing, her wonder elating, her sorrows chilling . . . We enter ‘asylum of thought / & afterthought,’ the inner precincts of a poet tracing the nexus between mind and body, human and nature, life and death, while sheltering the small flame of hope, so tenuous, so necessary.”

—Donna Seaman, Booklist

“Jill Bialosky’s fifth collection, Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections (Knopf), is also an exploration of personal loss and its aftermath — in this case, the poet's sister’s suicide —through widening circles of allusion, reference, and metaphor. {with} lyrical empathy and deep intelligence the poet brings to every page.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books

“From personal story of a sister's suicide, to chants and whispers and lullabies assembled in a way as to create a book of days for this moment of terror and elegy, this book investigates into the ability of language to provide answers and comfort at the moment when there is no comfort to be found, and no answers: when all we can do is ‘at the edge of the Hudson to watch the tugboats / & remind ourselves we live on an island of buildings. / The mayor warned us not to go out.’ And yet, the poet insists—beautifully, gracefully, memorably—on seeking a sanctuary: ‘asylum / in which the mind seeks / to keep itself from torture, asylum of thought / & afterthought, asylum / where birds mate & nourish.’ Indeed. May we all find such asylum.”
—Ilya Kaminsky

“Asylum is a refuge; from grief, and from threat of extinction. Bialosky weaves together the big cosmic time of trees and the natural world, with the detailed, apparently ordinary time of one woman’s everyday life. The result is an exquisite contemplation of what it is to live after one has lost a sister to suicide; what it is to live in a post-holocaust world, and what it is to live among trees. The litany of memory, individual and collective, becomes fugue, becomes mantra. “Like trees, / we all eventually fall”, but we are richer with the quiet asylum of Bialosky’s poetry. Whether you are a yoga lover, a tree lover, a mother, a reader, a sister, you will find something to love in this luminous collection.”
—Sarah Ruhl

“Asylum, Jill Bialosky's Asylum, is her strongest collection to date. Here she writes beautifully of a journey from despair through a dark wood, invoking Dante, Blake, and Paul Celan on the way. Memories of personal and worldly violence paradoxically enable her to see things in their luminous clarity: a fallen bird, a frail daffodil, butterflies mating, snow that tastes of rust and weighs on branches. So compelling is her vision, so urgent her perceptions, that her grief becomes our grief, her world ours. We are with her on every step of a search that ends in art, and in a language that can save us.”
—Grace Schulman

“Reading Jill Bialosky’s poems feels like taking a slow and lone journey into the depth of the human heart, yet all the while being accompanied and guided by an intimate voice. An urgent and expansive book, Asylum is a must-read for anyone who ponders over life and death and all that comes in between.”
—Yiyun Li

“Jill Bialosky’s Asylum is a collection of terse forms and psalms that add up to a powerful, full-throated deliverance. Each trope captures life and death matters—a singing, a keening, within each taut, well-made release. Rather than craving a physical space, asylum is sought in language, metaphor, meditation, yoga, query, and hope. And one of the joys of reading this collection is to feel its poignancy through verbal accretion. Asylum is experimental and, at times, nearly classical, but always intently alive with lyrical truths.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa

Asylum

Sample from Asylum — Thrive: A Lyric Sequence

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Finalist for the 2020 National Jewish Book Award

Poetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir

“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

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.

The End of Desire

Jill Bialosky's first collection of poems is an exceptional one—moving, very accomplished, marked by an unflinching realism and a sharply observant eye combined with great technical skill. Childhood and adolescence shattered by a father's death and the struggles of a mother to raise her daughters are among its concerns. The poems have a dignity and magic that are quite distinctive.