Central Skagit Library District

"Life, like a poem, is a series of choices." In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman's personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist...

"Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How...

"A sweeping and stunning novel about what happened to the poet Elizabeth Bishop during three life-changing weeks she spent in Paris amidst the imminent threat of World War II. June 1937. Elizabeth Bishop, still only a young woman and not yet one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, arrives in Paris with her college roommate. They are in search of an escape, and inspiration, far from the protective world of Vassar College where they...

In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City : the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.

"An engaging, intimate portrait of Emily Dickinson, one of America's greatest and most-mythologized poets, that sheds new light on her groundbreaking poetry. On August 3, 1845, young Emily Dickinson declared, "All things are ready"-and with this resolute statement, her life as a poet began. Despite spending her days almost entirely "at home" (the occupation listed on her death certificate), Dickinson's interior world was extraordinary. She loved passionately,...

The extraordinarily told, one-of-a-kind story of legendary author and children’s book icon Ruth Krauss
Born
a baby
late at night
there’s no parade
just crashing rain
 
She listens listens
writes and draws
stitches pages
sews a book
She finds another way
to tell a tale
 
This unique...

"From an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and the author of Motherland, a novel about two love affairs set in Amherst--one in the present, one in the past, and both presided over by Emily Dickinson. Alice Dickinson is a young advertising executive who works in London and dreams of becoming a screenwriter. She decides to take some time off work to research her idea for a screenplay: the true story of a scandalous adulterous love affair that took place...

"Poet Laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life. In the second memoir from the first Native American to serve as US poet laureate, Joy Harjo invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic meditation, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry...

Describes the author's deep friendship with a mysterious intellectual who introduced her to the culture and people of El Salvador in the 1970s, a tumultuous period in the country's history, inspiring her work as an unlikely activist.

"When a literary icon stays with the Dickinson family, Emily and her housemaid Willa find themselves embroiled in a shocking murder ... August 1856. The Dickinson family is comfortably settled in their homestead on Main Street. Emily's brother, Austin Dickinson, and his new wife are delighted when famous thinker and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson comes to Amherst to speak at a local literary society and decides he and his young secretary, Luther Howard,...