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Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet

Wiman, C. (2007). Ambition and survival: Becoming a Poet. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press. The Handbook of Psychoanalytic Holocaust Studies (p. 204).

Summary

Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet is a collection of stirring personal essays and critical prose on a wide range of subjects—reading Paradise Lost in Guatemala, recalling violent episodes from the poet’s youth, traveling in Africa with an eccentric father—as well as a series of essays on poets, poetry, and poetry’s place in our lives. The book concludes with a reckoning with Wiman’s diagnosis with a rare cancer, and a clear-eyed declaration of what it means—for an artist and a person—to have faith in the face of death.