When renowned poet Fiona Skinner is asked about the inspiration behind her iconic work, The Love Poem, she has a story to tell. It begins in a big yellow house with a funeral, an iron poker, and the Pause: a free and feral summer in a middle-class Connecticut town. Caught between the predictable life they once led and an uncertain future that stretches before them, the Skinner siblings emerge from the Pause deeply connected. Two decades later, confronted...

"All through her childhood in Tehran, Forugh Farrokhzad is told that Persian daughters should be quiet and modest. She is taught only to obey, but she always finds ways to rebel--gossiping with her sister among the fragrant roses of her mother's walled garden, venturing to the forbidden rooftop to roughhouse with her three brothers, writing poems to impress her strict, disapproving father, and sneaking out to flirt with a teenage paramour over café...

"A contemporary story about the insular world of writers, centering on a notable female poet and the young woman to whom she reveals her long-guarded secret about a famous manuscript"--

Why is it easier for a woman to be a muse than to have one? Can one be fully creative--in art or life--without the inspiration of erotic love? These are the questions asked in The Geometry of Love, a novel set in New York in the 1980s, then fast-forwarding to Northern California 20 years later. Julia, an aspiring poet, is living with her British boyfriend Ben, a restrained professor at Princeton, when she has a chance meeting with Michael, a long-ago...

"A retelling of a fantastical true story: two young men seduce Nobel laureate Juan Ramon Jiménez with the words of an imaginary woman and inspire one of his greatest love poems. Jose Galvez and Carlos Rodriguez are poets. Or, at least, they'd like to be. Sons of Lima's elite in the early twentieth century, they scribble bad verses and read the greats: Rilke, Rimbaud, and, above all others, Juan Ramon Jiménez, the Spanish Maestro. Desperate for Jiménez's...

The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky -- Examines life in a South American dictatorship. Centered on the journal of a poet-in-exile and his failed attempts at translating a maddening text, it is told by a young woman trying to come to grips with a country that nearly devoured itself. My Heart Struck Sorrow -- A librarian discovers Depression Era recordings from the Deep South--valuable archives of the rich folk history that survived in the face of an encroaching...

When elusive and highly secretive poet Emily Sutton reemerges into society, making strange accusations, Jenny Weston and her neighbor, author Zoe Zola, look into the poet's half-truths, which leads them to a horrible murder.