Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Poetry of Suicide: Lessons in Grief from the Lives and Deaths of Poets

The Poetry of Suicide: Lessons in Grief from the Lives and Deaths of Poets

Welsch, J. T.

Hardcover

Poetry CriticismDeath & Dying

Publisher Price: $29.95

ISBN10: 1526191997
ISBN13: 9781526191991
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: Apr 21 2026
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.15
Height: 1.20 Width: 5.10 Depth: 8.60
Language: English

A profound exploration of the connection between poetry and suicide.

'Suicides have a special language', Anne Sexton wrote in her 1964 poem 'Wanting to Die'. But is it a language we can learn to read?

In The poetry of suicide, J. T. Welsch interweaves stories of poets who took their own lives with the long history of suicide in his own family, searching for a new way of understanding these difficult deaths. Beginning with Hamlet's 'To be or not to be?', he delves into the work of Dante, Sylvia Plath, Vladimir Mayakovsky and others, asking what it can teach us about suicide's messy reality.

Suicide is more like poetry than we realise, Welsch argues. Both are filled with ambiguities, contradictions and unknowable intentions. Both demand and resist interpretation. Recovering the personal dimension often lost in our medicalised public discourse, Welsch finds practical ways of confronting suicide's poem-like difficulties.

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