The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet writes about her life, the creative process, and the work of other poets.

"From Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin, a timeless memoir of life, love, and poetry. Maxine Kumin left an unrivaled legacy as a pioneering poet and feminist. The Pawnbroker's Daughter charts her journey from a childhood in the Jewish community in Depression-era Philadelphia, where Kumin's father was a pawnbroker, to Radcliffe College, where she comes into her own as an intellectual and meets the soldier-turned-Los Alamos scientist who would become her husband; to her metamorphosis from a poet of "light verse" to a "poet of witness"; to her farm in rural New England, the subject and setting of much of her later work. Against all odds, Kumin channels her dissatisfaction with the life that is expected of her as a wife and a mother into her work as a feminist and one of the most renowned and remembered twentieth-century American poets" --

Kumin reflects on the process of writing poetry and on life in the country

From as little as the snail to as big as the giraffe, from the thundering mastodon of long ago to the ordinary backyard squirrel of today, the animals in this book inspire our imagination. Here is a fascinating cornucopia that exudes a whimsical affection and respect for the creatures with whom we share our kingdom.

This luminous collection is Maxine Kumin's twelfth volume of poetry, the first since her remarkable memoir, Inside the Halo. Themes of loyalty, longevity, and recovery appear here, along with poems addressing the eminent dead: Wordsworth, Gorki, Rukeyser, and others. "Inescapably, many poems come up out of the earth I live on and tend to," Kumin says.

Poems about the inner and outer realities of creatures, plants, houses, lovers, and others in the New England landscape.

Throughout her career, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Maxine Kumin has been at the vanguard of discussions about feminism and sexism, the state of poetry, and our place in the natural world. The Roots of Things gathers into one volume her best essays on the issues that have been closest to her throughout her storied career. Divided into sections on "Taking Root," "Poets and Poetry," and "Country Living," these pieces reveal Kumin honing her views within a variety of forms, including speeches, critical essays, and introductions of other writers’ work. Whether she is recollecting scenes from her childhood, ruminating on the ups and downs of what she calls "pobiz" (for "poetry business"), describing the battles she’s fought on behalf of women, or illuminating the lives of animals, Kumin offers insight that can only be born of long and closely observed experience.

In her first collection since 1982, this Pulizter Prize-winning poet redefines and expands upon her themes of home and family by showing them in the context of survival in a nuclear age

"The power that Kumin draws from and brings to literature is potent and seemingly inexhaustible."―Booklist Here Maxine Kumin's signature nature poems are shaken up and invigorated by the darker, human realities. She focuses our attention on the pleasures of horse-keeping with poems such as "The Zen of Mucking Out," then exhorts us to "Please Pay Attention," decrying Dick Cheney's "canned hunting / where you don't stay to pluck / the feathers." With equanimity, Kumin faces the disappointments and joys of sixty years of marriage―ending with the unspoken question of "Which of us will go down first...."

"Measured but warm, this work draws you in; it is another success among her many titles."--"Library Journal" In her fifteenth collection, Maxine Kumin meditates on the social consequences of such events as the bicentennial of the Civil War, and looks to poets writing from circumstances vastly different from her own. With death the central theme, poems of the body and praise songs for beloved animals explore how memory consoles and haunts.

Set in a small town that houses little more than a research lab and an engineering school, the body of the lab's director is found in a pit used for maternal deprivation experiments with monkeys. A few days later, a graduate student is found murdered as well. Are these deaths connected? And who's responsible for these murders? Written by one of America's greatest poets, this mystery is a scathing social commentary with a criminal twist. Maxine Kumin is the author of poetry, novels, short stories, essays and a number of children's books. She has received several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Poets' Prize, the Levinson Prize, and most recently, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She lives in Warner, New Hampshire.