Maxine Kumin

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.

A Memoir

The Pawnbroker's Daughter

Women, Animals, and Vegetables

Contains thirty-one poems under the headings: In the family--Out there--On the farm.

Poems

The Long Approach

Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief

"Kumin writes ... with the clear gaze of a journalist and the ire of an activist.... Filled with love."—Christian Science Monitor Here Maxine Kumin's signature nature poems are shaken up and invigorated by the darker, human realities. Both "delicate and powerful" (Library Journal), she faces with equanimity the disappointments and joys of sixty years of marriage—ending with the unspoken question of "Which of us will go down first."

Still to Mow: Poems

A collection of poems from the Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate of the United States, including poems from five of her past 17 books, and including 23 new poems that reflect on the author's farm life and poets of the past.

Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990-2010

Nearly twenty years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin transplanted her urban family to an overgrown New Hampshire farm. Her latest prose work, a graceful and appealing blend of ten essays and eight stories, grew from the exertions and exhilarations of country living. Now a consummate horsewoman, Kumin here revels in the long-awaited birth of a foal; the rehabilitation of an abused mare; and such daily pleasures as the antics of Rilke, "the Poet's Dog, " and the tactile beauty of home-grown vegetables. Kumin also muses on the process of writing, as inspired by the natural rhythms of farm life. Her stories, always underscored by a profound attachment to the natural world, focus subtly on personal relationships - as between a young naturalist and her widowed father; or a love affair between a hunter and a radical environmentalist. Full of anecdote and advice, love and grief, these pieces showcase one of our most versatile and deeply passionate writers.

Essays & Stories

Women, Animals & Vegetables

In her essays, as with her Pultizer Prize-winning poetry, Maxine Kumin speaks to "the encounter": with poetry, poets, and the details of country life. In clear, direct prose Kumin is equally at ease musing over her garden or discussing poetic form, raising horses or critiquing the work of other poets. For Kumin, poetry is inseparable from daily life. Whether remembering the early days of courtship with her husband (who then worked at Los Alamos during the first nuclear tests) or observing a grandchild learning to swim, poetry is a natural part of the discussion, as when, during an MRI, she recounts the healing role of memorized poems: "Lying in my MRI tomb and doggedly reciting the poem against the terrible rapping, I realized what saved me..".

Essays on a Life in Poetry

Always Beginning

Looking for Luck

Poems previously published in "The Atlantic Monthly", "New Yorker", and other magazines.

The Privilege

A Novel

The Passions of Uxport

Halfway

Anne Sexton

A brown field mouse and a caged, pet white mouse become close summertime friends.

Joey and the Birthday Present

The new wizard tries to solve all the town's problems, but carelessness with his own magic tears creates a tragedy instead.

The Wizard's Tears

Through Dooms of Love

Poems about the inner and outer realities of creatures, plants, houses, lovers, and others in the New England landscape.

Poems of New England, New and Selected

Up Country

Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Country Living (Poets on Poetry)

To Make a Prairie

Nightmare Factory

This luminous collection is Maxine Kumin's twelfth volume of poetry, the first since her remarkable memoir, Inside the Halo. Themes of loyalty, longevity, and recovery appear here, along with poems addressing the eminent dead: Wordsworth, Gorki, Rukeyser, and others. "Inescapably, many poems come up out of the earth I live on and tend to," Kumin says.

Maxine Kumin

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