Talking to Angels: A Life Spent in High Latitudes
Robert Perkins
Beacon Press, pb
$10.00 / $8.00

"A fragile, dolorous triptych of derangement, exploration, and loss. This memoir starts with the 19-year-old Perkins being packed off, raving, to a psychiatric hospital...When he manages to tuck in the frayed edges, he heads for an equally unforgiving terrain: the Arctic Northwest Territories of Canada, the setting that will make his reputation as a writer and public-television filmmaker...Then the story jumps to the year following his young wife's death of cancer... Perkins's 46 years have been a long, hard haul, but the guy's an artful survivor, unafraid to face the demons." -- Kirkus Reviews

The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
Perennial, HarperCollins, pb
$13.00 / $10.40

The only novel by troubled American poet Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar tells of a young woman's descent into madness and her emergence back to reality. "The first-person narrative fixes us there, in the doctor's office, in the asylum, in the madness, with no reassuring vacations when we can keep company with the sane and listen to their lectures." -- Washington Post Book World. • • • "The narrator simply describes herself as feeling very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel. The in-between moment is just what Miss Plath's poetry does catch brilliantly-the moment poised on the edge of chaos." -- Christian Science Monitor

Anne Sexton: A Biography
Diane Wood Middlebrook
Vintage, Random House, pb
$17.00 / $13.60

"A wonderful book, just, balanced, insightful, complex in its sympathies and in its judgment of Sexton both as a person and as a writer... a deeply moving account." -- The New York Times Book Review • • • "Judicious and canny. [Middlebrook] appreciates both Sexton's gifts as a poet and her attractive side as a human being...but looks at her destructive weaknesses with a steady eye." -- Time • • • "Sympathetic but resolutely unsentimental ... intelligent, sensitive, at times harrowing." -- Washington Post Book World

The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston from Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, 1955-1960
Peter Davison
W.W. Norton, pb
$14.00 / $11.20

An intimately perceptive account, by a poet who knew them all -- Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich -- the brilliant circle of poets who lived and worked in Boston during "one of the most vital milieux for poetry in the history of our country." Peter Davison gives us "brilliant young people pushing themselves to the limit, emotionally, intellectually, and often financially, for the love of a most unremunerative art." -- New York magazine

My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell
Sarah Payne Stuart
Perennial, HarperCollins, pb
$13.00 / $10.40

"Fine, sad, funny...Like all good memoirs, Stuart's provides entree into an entire swath of history and the places where it unfolded, with the added bonus that her family's story is attached to 300 years of America's...She learned many lessons from her study of a distinguished, tragic past, and we can count ourselves lucky that she put them together in this outstanding book." -- Boston Magazine