"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" --

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

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.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, a stunning collection of poems that course with the rhythms of nature. A poet of piercing revelations and arresting imagery, Kumin is "unforgettable, indispensable" (New York Times Book Review). In And Short the Season she muses on mortality: her own and that of the earth. Always deeply personal, always political, these poems blend myth and modernity, fecundity and death, and the violence and tenderness of humankind. From "Whereof the Gift Is Small" And short the season, first rubythroat in the fading lilacs, alyssum in bloom, a honeybee bumbling in the bleeding heart on my gelding’s grave while beetles swarm him underground. Wet feet, wet cuffs, little flecks of buttercup on my sneaker toes, bluets, violets crowding out the tufts of rich new grass the horses nose and nibble like sleepwalkers held fast— brittle beauty—might this be the last?

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.