Jill Bialosky is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Asylum (Knopf, 2020), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her new volume, Reasons for Surviving the Night: New & Selected Poems, will be published by Knopf in fall 2026. She has published critically acclaimed novels, including The Deceptions (Counterpoint, 2022), a finalist for the Gotham Book Prize, and three works of nonfiction, The End Is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother (Washington Square Press, 2025), Poetry Will Save Your Life (Atria Books, 2017), and History of a Suicide (Atria Books, 2011), a New York Times bestseller. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, and The Best American Poetry. In 2014, Bialosky was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to poetry. She is an executive editor and vice president at W. W. Norton & Company.
Visitation
Fall 2025
Visitation
& there was the garden half circled with trees& there was a silent woman in white, a nun, a nurse,Or a punisher — I did not know — who had come to deliverMy child. […]
Nature's (Human) Nature
May/June 2018
Interior Landscape: 6:00 a.m.
Before I open my eyes, breathe in the soiled air from the construction site across the street, before I know whether it's cold or damp, or bright, recall whether I […]
Poetry
Spring 2014
Jane Austen
A fine Sunday in Bath empties every house of its inhabitants, and all the world appears on such an occasion to walk about and tell their acquaintance what a charming […]
Poetry
Spring 2014
The Lucky Ones
We were in the twilight of our lives. Our labor suddenly realized in the crowns of marigolds, blue eyes of the hydrangeas, smell of lavender, and late bloom of the […]
Poetry
Summer 2008
The Skiers
I. It begins with snow. The lone wilderness. An intruder, high in the silver hill-top. A racer, he swiftly glides the slick mountain back, slips between startled lovers— no forewarning. […]
Poetry
Spring 2005
The Seduction
It was ablaze, the room in the apartment building facing the back courtyard where the poet slept, and she awoke not to the sound of sirens but to glass breaking, […]
Poetry
Spring 2005
The Poet Contemplates the Intensity of Her Emotions
The marriage counselor suggested the poet attempt to gauge the intensity of her emotions. Like extreme weather, volatile emotion has the ability to threaten the stability of any field. The […]
Poetry
Spring 2005
The Poet Contemplates the Nature of Reality
On the side of the road a deer, frozen, frigid. The poet was like that, trying not to feel anything— Go back to your life, the voice said. (What is […]
Poetry
Spring 2005
The End of Love
In the dream it came as something inevitable, like the slow irreparable drift of earth that creates a cavern, a crack. She was in her kitchen with her coffee, with […]
In Memoriam
Remembering Maxine Kumin
I was a young editor at Norton in 1991 when I learned the thrilling news that my colleague Carol Houck Smith had offered to publish Maxine Kumin’s new book of […]
Spring 2013
The Unreasoning Mask: The Shared Interior Architecture of Poetry and Memoir
Years ago when I first thought I might write about my sister’s suicide in prose, but had no idea how to approach it, I asked the essayist and poet Thomas […]