P&P Live! Jill Bialosky – Asylum: A personal, historical, natural inquiry in 103 lyric sections – in conversation with Yiyun Li

This book-length sequence by the critically acclaimed poet is a seeker's story, revealing personal and historical traumas and how we search for understanding and meaning in their wake.

In Asylum: A personal, historical, natural inquiry in 103 lyric sections, poet Jill Bialosky embarks on a Virgilian journey, building a narrative sequence from 103 elegant poems and prose sections that cohere in their intensity and their need to explore darkness and sustenance both. Taken together, these piercing pieces--about her nascent calling as a writer; her sister's suicide and its still unfolding aftermath; the horror unleashed by World War II; the life cycle of the monarch butterfly; and the woods where she seeks asylum--form a moving story, powerfully braiding despair, survival, and hope. What Asylum delivers is a form of hard-won grace and an awareness of the cost of extreme violence, inexplicable loss, and the miraculous cycles of life, in work that carries Bialosky's art to a new level of urgency and achievement.

Bialosky will be in conversation with Yiyun Li, author of six works of fiction and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.