Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Jill Bialosky author of Poetry Will Save Your Life published this month by Atria. Jill is the author of four acclaimed collections of poetry most recently The Players. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic and Best American Poetry. She is also the author of three novels and a NYT best selling memoir, History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life. Jill is an executive editor at Norton and Company.

Poetry Will Change Your Life is a memoir of a life lived in stages and one which develops in great part because of Jill’s affinity with our greatest poets and their work. She has the ability to apply the lessons, the morals, the meanings of poems to her own backstory if you will and more importantly for us she then has the capability of showing us how we can do the same.

Each named chapter, having to do with Jill’s life, is then coupled with one, or two or sometimes several poems which underscore an experience, bring insight and clarity to a change in life or emphasize the importance of what has just happened to Jill.

All in all, some of your favorite poems--- whether Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Road Not Taken, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud or even the 23rd Psalm are given new meaning and nuance and help us to understand more about Jill but more importantly more about ourselves.