Books by Jill Bialosky
History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life
“It is so nice to be happy. It always gives me a good feeling to see other people happy. . . . It is so easy to achieve.” —Kim’s journal entry, May 3, 1988
On the night of April 15, 1990, Jill Bialosky’s twenty-one-year-old sister Kim came home from a bar in downtown Cleveland. She argued with her boyfriend on the phone. Then she took her mother’s car keys, went into the garage, closed the garage door. She climbed into the car, turned on the ignition, and fell asleep. Her body was found the next morning by the neighborhood boy her mother hired to cut the grass.
Those are the simple facts, but the act of suicide is anything but simple. For twenty years, Bialosky has lived with the grief, guilt, questions, and confusion unleashed by Kim’s suicide. Now, in a remarkable work of literary nonfiction, she re-creates with unsparing honesty her sister’s inner life, the events and emotions that led her to take her life on this particular night. In doing so, she opens a window on the nature of suicide itself, our own reactions and responses to it—especially the impact a suicide has on those who remain behind.
Combining Kim’s diaries with family history and memoir, drawing on the works of doctors and psychologists as well as writers from Melville and Dickinson to Sylvia Plath and Wallace Stevens, Bialosky gives us a stunning exploration of human fragility and strength. She juxtaposes the story of Kim’s death with the challenges of becoming a mother and her own exuberant experience of raising a son. This is a book that explores all aspects of our familial relationships—between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters—but particularly the tender and enduring bonds between sisters.
History of a Suicide brings a crucial and all too rarely discussed subject out of the shadows, and in doing so gives readers the courage to face their own losses, no matter what those may be. This searing and compassionate work reminds us of the preciousness of life and of the ways in which those we love are inextricably bound to us.
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History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life
In this New York Times bestseller, Jill Bialosky, poet and author, undergoes “a profound and lyrical investigation” (New York magazine) as she attempts to understand the events and emotional state that led her sister to commit suicide and the impact of her death on family and loved ones.
On April 15, 1990, Kim, Jill Bialosky’s younger sister, arrived home from a bar after a fight with her boyfriend. She took her mother’s keys, went into the closed garage, and turned on the ignition. Her body was discovered the next morning by a neighborhood boy.
For decades, Bialosky has grappled with the guilt, questions, and devastation that was unloosed by Kim’s suicide. Now, in this remarkable memoir, she attempts to reconstruct the complex inner life of her sister and in doing so, unlocks the nature of suicide itself and how we are each deeply affected by it.
In the course of trying to understand what drove her sister that night, Bialosky examines some of the most fundamental questions of human nature—why some of us more emotionally stable than others, even when raised in the same circumstances; how the unconscious shape our identities; what the difference is between depression and suicidal feelings; and why we sometimes fail to love and protect one another.
Combining Kim’s own personal writings with family history, medical reportage, literary criticism, and research, Bialosky has crafted “an extraordinarily valiant and resonant testimony to the healing powers of truth and empathy” (Booklist).
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The Life Room
Eleanor Cahn, a professor of literature, wife of a preeminent surgeon, and devoted mother of two, is in Paris to present a paper on Anna Karenina. A chance encounter brings to the surface passions she has suppressed for years. As The Life Room unfolds, we learn the secrets of her erotic past: ethereal William, her high school boyfriend; her role as muse to troubled painter Adam; her marriage to loyal, steady Michael. On her return to New York, Eleanor's charged attraction to another man takes on a life of its own, threatening to destroy everything she has. Jill Bialosky has created a fresh, piercingly real heroine who must choose between responsibility and desire.
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Intruder
From acclaimed poet Jill Bialosky: a haunting series of poems about the dangers of eros and the creation of art, “as intense and perfectly noted as violin concertos” (Booklist).
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Asylum: A personal, historical, natural inquiry in 103 lyric sections
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.
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$28.99
Poetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir
“Bialosky’s erudite and instructive approach to poetry [is] itself a refreshing tonic.” —Chicago Tribune
“Wisdom and deep compassion...make [Bialosky’s book] a tremendous asset both to readers and other writers.” —The Washington Post
An unconventional and inventive coming-of-age memoir organized around fifty-one 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 a child, the day in New York City the Twin Towers fell. As Bialosky narrates these moments, she illuminates the ways in which particular poems offered insight, compassion, and connection, and shows how poetry can be a blueprint for living. In Poetry Will Save Your Life, Bialosky recalls when she encountered each formative poem, and how its importance and meaning evolved over time, allowing new insights and perceptions to emerge.
While Bialosky’s personal stories animate each poem, they touch on many universal experiences, from the awkwardness of girlhood, to crises of faith and identity, from braving a new life in a foreign city to enduring the loss of a loved one, from becoming a parent to growing creatively as a poet and artist.
In Poetry Will Save Your Life, Bialosky has crafted an engaging and entirely original examination of a life while celebrating the enduring value of poetry, not as a purely cerebral activity, but as a means of conveying personal experience and as a source of comfort and intimacy. In doing so she brilliantly illustrates the ways in which poetry can be an integral part of life itself and can, in fact, save your life.
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Poetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir
From a critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author and poet comes “a delightfully hybrid book: part anthology, part critical study, part autobiography” (Chicago Tribune) that is organized around fifty-one remarkable poems by poets such as Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath.
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 a child, the day in New York City the Twin Towers fell. As Bialosky narrates these moments, she illuminates the ways in which particular poems offered insight, compassion, and connection, and shows how poetry can be a blueprint for living. In Poetry Will Save Your Life, Bialosky recalls when she encountered each formative poem, and how its importance and meaning evolved over time, allowing new insights and perceptions to emerge.
While Bialosky’s personal stories animate each poem, they touch on many universal experiences, from the awkwardness of girlhood, to crises of faith and identity, from braving a new life in a foreign city to enduring the loss of a loved one, from becoming a parent to growing creatively as a poet and artist. Each moment and poem illustrate “not only how to read poetry, but also how to love poetry” (Christian Science Monitor).
“An emotional, sometimes-wrenching account of how lines of poetry can be lifelines” (Kirkus Reviews), Poetry Will Save Your Life is an engaging and entirely original examination of a life while celebrating the enduring value of poetry, not as a purely cerebral activity, but as a means of conveying personal experience and as a source of comfort and intimacy. In doing so the book brilliantly illustrates the ways in which poetry can be an integral part of life itself and can, in fact, save your life.
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The Prize: A Novel
Edward Darby has everything a man could hope for: meaningful work, a loving wife, and a beloved daughter. With a rising career as a partner at an esteemed gallery, he strives not to let ambition, money, power, and his dark past corrode the sanctuary of his domestic and private life. Influenced by his father, a brilliant Romantics scholar, Edward has always been more of a purist than an opportunist. But when a celebrated artist controlled by her insecurities betrays him, and another very different artist awakens his heart and stirs up secrets from his past, Edward will find himself unmoored from his marriage, his work, and the memory of his beloved father. And when the finalist of an important prize are announced, and the desperate artists maneuver to seek its validation, Edward soon learns that betrayal comes in many forms, and that he may be hurtling toward an act that challenges his own notions about what comprises a life worth living. A compelling odyssey of a man unhinged by his ideals, The Prize is also an unflinching portrait of a marriage struggling against the corroding tide of time and the proximity to the treacherous fault line between art and money.
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The Prize: A Novel
Edward Darby has everything a man could hope for: meaningful work, a loving wife, and a beloved daughter. With a rising career as a partner at an esteemed gallery he strives not to let ambition, money, power, and his dark past corrode the sanctuary of his domestic and private life. Influenced by his father, a brilliant Romantics scholar, Edward has always been more of a purist than an opportunist. But when a celebrated artist controlled by her insecurities betrays him, and another very different artist awakens his heart and stirs up secrets from his past, Edward will find himself unmoored from his marriage, his work, and the memory of his beloved father. And when the finalists of an important prize are announced, and the desperate artists maneuver to seek its validation, Edward soon learns that betrayal comes in many forms, and that he may be hurtling toward an act that challenges his own notions about what comprises a life worth living. A compelling odyssey of a man unhinged by his ideals, The Prize is as well an unflinching portrait of a marriage struggling against the corroding tide of time and the proximity to the treacherous fault line between art and money.
Inspired by her work as a poet and the need to preserve a private space for the creation of art, and with language that pierces with longing, passion, and intelligence, The Prize by Jill Bialosky is her most evocative and moving novel yet.
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The Deceptions
Finalist for the Gotham Book Prize
An explosive tale of art and myth, desire and betrayal, from New York Times bestselling author Jill Bialosky
Something terrible has happened and I don't know what to do. An unnamed narrator's life is unraveling. Her only child has left home, and her twenty-year marriage is strained. Anticipation about her soon-to-be-released book of poetry looms. She seeks answers to the paradoxes of love, desire, and parenthood among the Greek and Roman gods at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As she passes her days teaching at a boys' prep school, spending her off-hours sequestered in the museum's austere galleries, she is haunted by memories of a yearlong friendship with a colleague, a fellow poet struggling with his craft. As secret betrayals and deceptions come to light and rage threatens to overwhelm her, the pantheon of gods assume remarkably vivid lives of their own, forcing her to choose between reality and myth in an effort to free herself from the patriarchal constraints of the past and embrace a new vision for her future.
The Deceptions is a page-turning and seductively told exploration of female sexuality and ambition as well as a human drama that dares to test the stories we tell ourselves. It is also a brilliant investigation of a life caught between the dueling magnetic poles of privacy and its appropriation in art and literature. Celebrated poet, memoirist, and novelist Jill Bialosky has reached new and daring heights in her boldest work yet.
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$26.00
Open City #23: Prose by Poets
by Jim Harrison, Nick Flynn, Jill Bialosky, Wayne Koestenbaum, Glyn Maxwell, Deborah Garrison, Open City Magazine, Rebecca Wolff
Open City continues to present new writing with a daring edge and a youthful glow, appealing to readers who want to know what’s next in contemporary literature. This special issue features fiction, essays, and artworkall by poets. Each piece of prose will be accompanied by a selection of the writer’s poems. Contributors include: Deborah Garrison, Nick Tosches, Honor Moore, Rodney Jack, David Lehman, Jim Harrison, Thurston Moore, David Berman, and Catherine Bowman, Alfred Star Hamilton, and Jerome Badanes.
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The Players: Poems
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.
The opening sequence, “Manhood,” looks at the insular world of baseball, shedding light on the complexities of gender, boyhood, and coming-of-age. The poet captures the electrifying, proud language of baseball talk, channeling the tone and approach of the young men she observes as a mother, and bringing poignancy and deeper understanding to the transaction between herself and the young men she sees growing into adulthood. “American Comedy” is a sonnet sequence about the absurdities and realities of modern domestic life, while figures in literature are the players in “Interlude.” The final section, “The Players,” becomes a forceful and searing revelation about the legacy of generations. Exploring the nature of attachment on many levels, The Players brings us Jill Bialosky at her best, in poems that find a new language to describe the rich and universal story that is modern motherhood.
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No copies available.
The Players: Poems
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.
The opening sequence, “Manhood,” looks at the insular world of baseball, shedding light on the complexities of gender, boyhood, and coming-of-age. The poet captures the electrifying, proud language of baseball talk, channeling the tone and approach of the young men she observes as a mother, and bringing poignancy and deeper understanding to the transaction between herself and the young men she sees growing into adulthood. “American Comedy” is a sonnet sequence about the absurdities and realities of modern domestic life, while figures in literature are the players in “Interlude.” The final section, “The Players,” becomes a forceful and searing revelation about the legacy of generations. Exploring the nature of attachment on many levels, The Players brings us Jill Bialosky at her best, in poems that find a new language to describe the rich and universal story that is modern motherhood.
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$36.00