"Jennifer Michael Hecht writes delightfully tricky poems that wildly bend the sense of our language."--Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate

"Hecht's rhymes are irregular, gymnastic, pointed, and fun; she's found what so many would-be populists seek, an idiom entirely conversational yet able to sustain unexpected ideas."--"The Believer"

"Who Said" is a meditation on life's profound questions told through playful engagement with iconic poems and lyrics. Jennifer Michael Hecht's book is a magic echo chamber wherein great poems come back to us, altered to fit the concerns of our moment. This wildly interpretive treatment of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and the rock band Nirvana is original, occasionally hilarious, and always moving.

From "Not Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening":

""Promises to keep," was a lie, he had nothing. Throughthe woods. Over the river and into the pain. It is an addict'stalk of quitting as she's smacking at a vein. He was alwaysgoing into the woods. It was he who wrote, "The only way"

"around is through." You'd think a shrink, but no, a poet. He saw the woods and knew. The forest is the one that holdspromises. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, they fillwith a quiet snow. Miles are traveled as we sleep. He steers"

"his horse off the road. Among the trees now, the blizzardis a dusting. Holes in the canopy make columns of snowstorm, lit from above. His little horse thinks it is queer. They godeeper, sky gets darker. It's the darkest night of the year . . . "

Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of several nonfiction titles, most recently "The Happiness Myth" (HarperOne). She teaches at The New School and lives in the BoCoCa neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.

Following the success of previous edition, Early Vascular Aging (EVA), Second Edition, continues to be the most comprehensive and authoritative resource on the premature alterations in artery structure and function.The book presents a novel approach to the problem of cardiovascular disease, showing it in relation to great vessels disease and revealing a comprehensive approach to the problem of increased rigidity of the great vessels, its causes, and further consequences. This second edition contains completely updated content with expanded coverage of basic and translational research, systematic reviews of the most prominent literature, discussion of applicability of new evidence and more.Written by an international team of clinicians and researchers, this is a valuable resource to basic and translational scientists, clinical researchers and clinicians in the cardiovascular field interested in prevention, diagnosis and treatment of EVA.

A leading public critic reminds us of the compelling reasons people throughout time have found to stay alive Worldwide, more people die by suicide than by murder, and many more are left behind to grieve. Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history's most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments she hopes to bring back into public consciousness. From the Stoics and the Bible to Dante, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and such twentieth-century writers as John Berryman, Hecht recasts the narrative of our "secular age" in new terms. She shows how religious prohibitions against self-killing were replaced by the Enlightenment's insistence on the rights of the individual, even when those rights had troubling applications. This transition, she movingly argues, resulted in a profound cultural and moral loss: the loss of shared, secular, logical arguments against suicide. By examining how people in other times have found powerful reasons to stay alive when suicide seems a tempting choice, she makes a persuasive intellectual and moral case against suicide.