I have never felt so simultaneously alive and lonely in my life. But it's not as if I'm forlorn. There are letters. There are poems, themselves like wayward children, their hair needing to be tamed by spit and a good metal comb. And there is my life with Jimmy, which is at turns dramatic, intellectual, and lushly poetic. However broke we are, we live lively. Nancy Milford's biography, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, keeps good company. Beware girl poets.




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