Dying for Beauty: Poems

Whether paying tribute to literary icons such as Walt Whitman and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or examining global and cultural degradation, Wronsky proves to be a poet of sharp wit and endearing wonder. The crowning jewel of Dying for Beauty is "Desdemona," a nearly book-length lyric that alternates between meditation and dramatization, between discourse and incantation. "I started out thinking I was writing an elegy for the earth - from my own self, in my own neighborhood, with its crack addicts and war-like helicopters, its poverty and ?lthiness...And yet also, here I was with a new daughter and this love in me, equal to nothing else."

"Formally, the poem ['Desdemona'] brings into its amplitude and openness material that could be inert, but is lifted always by rhythmic urgency and a faultless, inventive music....Wronsky is also trying to think through the poem, reason passionately through its issues of language, gender, fear and loss."-The Boston Review

Gail Wronsky received a BA and an MFA from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. She is the author of two books of poetry and teaches at Loyola-Marymount University in Los Angeles.