Morning In The Burned House

The renowned poet and author of The Handmaid's Tale "brings a swift, powerful energy" to this "intimate and immediate" poetry collection (Publishers Weekly).

These beautifully crafted poems, by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate, are some of Margaret Atwood's most accomplished and versatile works. Some draw on history and some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, are intimate poems about family, the fragility of the natural world, and death. Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this lyrical poetry rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive.

What rises from the ashes of memory and myth?

• Mythic Retellings: Step into the shoes of Helen of Troy working the counter or hear from a woman accused of witchcraft in Puritan New England.
• Poems About Grief and Loss: A daughter navigates the final days of her father's life through a series of stark, compassionate, and deeply personal verses.
• The Natural World: Witness the sly resilience of a red fox on a frozen pond and the startling beauty of a single stalk of asparagus in poems that find profundity in the everyday.
• Feminist Poetry: Atwood's signature sharp wit and insight are on full display, exploring the tensions between body and word, history and self.