Molly Peacock
Acclaimed Poet
“[Peacock] has a luxuriantly sensual imagination—and an equally sensual feel for the language. In mood her poems range from high-spirited whimsy to bemused reflection. Whatever the subject, rich music follows the tap of Molly Peacock's baton.” —Washington Post
“Peacock’s poems are filled with little formal miracles, the sort of verbal dazzlement we grew up on but have starved for in the barren days of the plain style.” —Georgia Review
Author of six volumes of poetry, including The Second Blush and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems, Molly Peacock has been widely anthologized. Her poems appear in The Best of the Best American Poetry and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She is former president of the Poetry Society of America, and was a co-creator of the Poetry in Motion program in New York City’s public transportation. She co-edited the anthology Poetry in Motion: 100 Poems from the Subways and Buses.
Peacock is also the author of a memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece, where she explains her choice not to have children, and the loneliness women often feel in dealing with the social pressures concerning motherhood. Her other prose books include How to Read a Poem… and Start a Poetry Circle. She is the editor of a collection of essay The Private I: Privacy in a Public World. Her essay “Passion Flowers in Winter” appears in The Best American Essays, 2007. Other essays have appeared in Elle, House & Garden, Creative Nonfiction, New York Magazine, and O the Oprah Magazine.
Peacock also wrote and performed in a one-woman show in poems, The Shimmering Verge, which presents her life as a poet. The show toured the US and Canada, including off Broadway. The New York Times described it as “stunning memory pieces…[with] animated, sometimes comical delivery.”
Among her honors are fellowships from the Danforth, Ingram Merrill, and Woodrow Wilson Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, as well as other leading literary journals. This year she holds a Fellowship from the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center to write about eighteenth-century flower collage artist Mary Delany. Peacock has been a writer-in-residence and teacher at numerous universities, and currently serves on the graduate faculty of the Spalding University Brief Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing.
She received a BA magna cum laude from SUNY Binghamton and an M.A. with honors from The Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University. Born in Buffalo Peacock is also a citizen of Canada, where she resides with her husband. In Canada she is the series editor for The Best Canadian Poetry in English, and the Poetry Editor of the Literary Review of Canada.
About SECOND BLUSH (2009)
Poems that rhyme, what joy. Homey poems about an unexpected late marriage to the calm man a shy boy from the past became, what bliss. Sweet poems of bed, cats, and kitchen time that abruptly crack open to reveal the chasm of fear and loss: powerful stuff. Peacock is in peak form in these seductive poems that swing and twirl so prettily, then suddenly, deviously, shockingly carom from contentment to despair and back again, just like life. And how spangled and vivid each domestic scene is, how electric with feelings and shadowed by death, like paintings by Bonnard or Vuillard. Because cancer made the marriage seem “a doomed possibility,” because the poet is confronting the haunting absence of a beloved cat, a smashed cup, a scar, dreams of epic cold and a dead sister. But then there is also a “jeweled” drop of water. A surprising kiss. A yoga pose and its “lunging beauty.” Peacock is valiant, trenchant, funny, and on point. —Donna Seaman
About PARADISE: PIECE BY PIECE (1999)
The author of four volumes of poetry, Molly Peacock proves she is equally adept at prose in this vividly graceful memoir. Some would say that Paradise, Piece by Piece is one more story of growing up in a dysfunctional family (alcoholic father, depressed mother, rebellious younger sister). Others would focus on Peacock's turbulent romantic life, while others still would place the emphasis on her decision to remain childless. The truth of the matter is that all of these threads are vital components of a single, intricately woven tapestry, held together by Peacock's painstaking attention to detail. Anybody who has struggled to define his or her own life against the expectations and demands of others (be they society or one's own blood) will find inspiration in Molly Peacock's life. —Amazon.com
