The Joy of Poetry

Part memoir, part humorous and poignant defense of poetry, this is a book that shows you what it is to live a life with poems at your side (and maybe in your Topo Chico®).

Megan Willome’s story is one you won’t want to put down; meanwhile, her uncanny ability to reveal the why’s and how’s of poetry keeps calling—to even the biggest poetry doubter. If you already enjoy poetry, her story and her wisdom and her ways will invite you to go deeper, with novel ideas on how to engage with poems.

A great National Poetry Month title for retreats, poets & writers’ groups, and book clubs. Or, if you’re a teacher who has ever been asked, “Why poetry?”, this book is the ready answer you’ve been needing.

Words About The Joy of Poetry

“Megan Willome’s The Joy of Poetry is not a long book, but it took me longer to read than I expected, because I kept stopping to savor poems and passages, to make note of books mentioned, and to compare Willome’s journey into poetry to my own. The book is many things. An unpretentious, funny, and poignant memoir. A defense of poetry, a response to literature that has touched her life, and a manual on how to write poetry. It’s also the story of a daughter who loses her mother to cancer. The author links these things into a narrative much like that of a novel. I loved this book. As soon as I finished, I began reading it again.”

—David Lee Garrison, author of Playing Bach in the D. C. Metro

In The Joy of Poetry, Megan Willome describes the bed she made up in her son’s room after he went away to college: a sheet set the color of daffodils, a comforter like cumulus clouds, and sky-blue pillows. Sometimes she sleeps in there, she writes, and when she does, “it’s all sun.” That’s also how the author views reading and writing poetry, as the sun that breaks through the gloom of her mother passing away from cancer, the “multiple gift” that can offer healing, purpose and inner strength, as well as a musical and emotional soundtrack to life and and its ultimate end. What Willome offers readers in this easily-consumed treasure, chock-full of digestible poems and quotes framed by the memoir of her mother’s diagnosis and treatment, is how to do likewise. As a creative writing teacher of middle and high school students, this has been my philosophy exactly, and I’m delighted to find someone who has put it into words. Willome’s pages are invaluable, and I know The Joy of Poetry will be required reading in my classes for a long time to come.

—Jen Karetnick, author of American Sentencing (Winter Goose Publishing, May 2016) and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016)

P.S. The first chapter of The Joy of Poetry is available FREE at tspoetrypress.substack.com.

EXPLORE NOW