The harp-weaver, and other poems

The collection that made Edna St. Vincent Millay the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. These are poems written with a young woman's fierce hunger for experience, for meaning, for transcendence in a world that seems both beautiful and indifferent. "Renascence" opens the volume with its extraordinary spiritual odyssey, one woman's ascent through despair toward something like grace. Millay writes about desire and death with the same unflinching honesty, her voice swinging between tender lyricism and stark, almost brutal clarity. These are poems that pulse with life: the body, the natural world, love lost and found, the constant approach of mortality. A century later, they still feel urgent, still feel dangerous. For anyone who wants poetry that burns.