The Dead and the Living

Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner comes a beautifully realized collection of poems about childhood, love, marriage, children, and honoring the dead. Larry Lewis say, “The Dead and the Living is an unignorable book, something truly rare. The feeling behind it is painful, but exquisitely so. Pain made into art or what, in another time, people called ‘beauty.’” It is an achievement of a poet writing in the full measure of her powers. The Lamont poetry selection of the Academy of American Poets.