Molly Peacock is a poet, biographer, essayist, and writer of tales whose multi-genre literary life has taken her from New York City to Toronto, from poetry to prose, from words to words-and-pictures, and from lyric self-examination to curiosity about the lives of others.
Image from The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72.
The Widow’s Crayon Box
A book-length sequence of poems that dares to affirm the vast variety of emotional colors in loss and rejuvenation.
After her husband’s death, Molly Peacock realized she was not living the received idea of a widow’s mauve existence but instead was experiencing life in all colors. These gorgeous poems―joyful, furious, mournful, bewildered, sexy, devastated, whimsical and above all, moving―composed in sonnet sequences and in open forms, designed in four movements (After, Before, When, and Afterglow)―illuminate both the role of the caregiver and the crystalline emotions one can experience after the death of a cherished partner. With her characteristic virtuosity, her fearless willingness to confront even the most difficult emotions, and always with buoyancy and zest, Peacock charts widowhood in the twenty-first century.
In the Spotlight
A Friend Sails in on a Poem
Two women begin a friendship in poetry, never anticipating it would last half a century…
For the last forty-six years, the distinguished poets Molly Peacock and Phillis Levin have read and discussed nearly every poem they’ve written—an unparalleled friendship in poetry. Here Peacock traces the development of their ideas about poetry across their lifelong back-and-forth, quoting their poems, investigating their childhoods, personalities, writing habits, reading habits, and startling differences. She speculates about their challenges as they meet across seminar tables, kitchen tables, coffee, tea and restaurant tables from their twenties through their sixties and seventies. A Friend Sails in on a Poem offers a charming, psychologically wise, and metaphorically piquant look at navigating craft, creativity, and companionship. This is a book both for serious poets as well as for anyone who wants a deep dive into the impact of friendship on art itself.
Flower Diary: Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door
In Flower Diary: Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door, the companion biography, Peacock looks at the balancing act of female creativity and domesticity in the life of Mary Hiester Reid, a painter who produced over three hundred stunning, emotive floral still lifes and landscapes. A winner of an Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Biography and named one of Quill & Quire’s Best Books of 2021.
“Peacock has many talents, not the least of which is her voice, characterized by engaging honesty and self-deprecating humor. She comes across as that fellow passenger on an airplane to whom you have suddenly and quite naturally confessed your story (and learned hers).”
– Lorna Blake, The Hudson Review
Image from Flower Diary / Mary Hiester Reid, Chrysanthemums, A Japanese Arrangement, Art Gallery of Ontario.
Featured Work
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In The Media
Image: Flower Diary/Mary Hiester Reid, Roses in a Vase, Courtesy Jeffrey Cooley Gallery, Lyme, CT