It’s a forceful and confident title that Jill Bialosky gives her unusual memoir, Poetry Will Save Your Life. She writes “will” not “can” or “may.” I’m not so sure, nor am I convinced that a favorite book wouldn’t do, or music, with its purported power to soothe the savage breast. Because it’s longer and without meter or rhythm, however, a novel is not as likely as a poem to prompt immediate reaction. In any case, there’s no denying that poetry as consolation, if not salvation, worked for Bialosky and her hope is that it will work for her readers. Bialosky makes an ardent case for reading and re-reading certain poems at critical moments when we feel lonely, powerless, fearful, depressed. The revisitings give her a sense of belonging to a more extended part of herself – times when she hadn’t felt low – and times that connected or reconnected with a larger world where others endure grief and pain. In the wake of a sister’s suicide, she invokes Sylvia Plath. In the wake of 9/11, Adam