Collects the best of Anne Sexton's memoirs and prose reflections on her development as a poet

Life took Gardner from the theater world of the 1930s and ’40s to the poetry scene of the ’50s and ’60s to the wild, bohemian art life of New York’s Hotel Chelsea in the ’70s. She often followed where romance, rather than career, led her. At nineteen, she had an affair with a future president of Ireland, then married and divorced three famous American husbands in succession. Turning from acting to poetry, Gardner became associate editor of Chicago’s Poetry magazine and earned success with her best-received collection, Birthdays from the Ocean, in 1955. Soon after, her life took a turn when she met the southern poet Allen Tate. He was married to Caroline Gordon but left her to wed Gardner, who moved to Minneapolis and gave up writing to please him, but after a few short years, Tate fell for a young nun and abandoned her.

In the liveliest of places at the right times, Gardner associated with many of the most significant cultural figures of her age, including her cousin Robert Lowell, T.S. Eliot, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Virgil Thomson, Tennessee Williams, and Robert Penn Warren. But famous connections could never save Isabella from herself. Having abandoned her work, she suffered through alcoholism, endured more failed relationships, and watched the lives of her children unravel fatally. Toward the end of her life, though, she took her pen back up for the poems in her final volume. Redeemed by her writing, Gardner died alone in 1981, just after being named the first poet laureate of New York State.

Through interviews with many Gardner intimates and extensive archival research, author Marian Janssen delves deep into the life of a woman whose poetry, according to one friend, “probably saved her sanity.” Much more than a biography, Not at All What One Is Used To is the story of a woman whose tumultuous life was emblematic of the cultural unrest at the height of the twentieth century.

Raucous adobe hearts and urban violet mascara. Televised immigration games and ethnic sit-coms. Chile con karma served on a bed of race. In a startling melange of poetry, prose, journal entries, and even a screenplay, Zen Chicano desperado Juan Felipe Herrera fixes his gaze on his own life and times to craft his most personal work to date.

Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is a river of faces and phrases, jottings and reflections—a personal pilgrimage and collective parade of love, mock-prophecy, and chiste. Tuning in voices from numerous time zones, languages, and minds, Herrera recalls his childhood and coming of age, his participation in the Chicano Movement, and the surreal aspects of postmodern America. He uses broad strokes to paint a historical, social, and familial portrait that moves from the twilight of the nineteenth century to the dawn of the twenty-first, then takes up a finer brush to etch the eternal tension between desire and frustration, hope and disillusionment, violence and tenderness.

Here are transamerican sutras spanning metrocenters from Mexico City to San Francisco, or slinking across the border from Juárez to El Paso. Outrageous, rhythmic lists—"Foodstuffs They Never Told Us About," "Things Religion Makes Me Do"—that fire the imagination. Celebrations of his Plutomobile that "runs on ham hawks & bird grease," and of Chicano inventions such as cilantro aftershave and "the art of eating Vicks VapoRub with your dedos."

Pushing forms to the edge of possibility while forcing readers to rethink reality as well as language, Herrera invokes childhoods and neighborhoods, stand-up clowns and Movimiento gypsies, grandmothers of the buñuelo kitchen and tragicomic soliloquies of dizzy-headed outcasts of paradise. Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is a crucible of flavorful language meant to be rolled lazily on the mind's tongue—and then swallowed whole to let its hot and savory sweetness fill your soul.