One of America’s most celebrated poets—and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923—Edna St. Vincent Millay defined a generation with her passionate lyrics and intoxicating voice of liberation. Edited by Millay biographer Nancy Milford, this Modern Library Paperback Classics collection captures the poet’s unique spirit in works like Renascence and Other Poems, A Few Figs from This-tles, and Second April, as well as in “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver” and eight sonnets from the early twenties. As Milford writes in her Introduction, “These are the poems that made Edna St. Vincent Millay’s reputation when she was young. Saucy, insolent, flip, and defiant, her little verses sting the page.”

"I am stirred by the poems in this book - it is a sharp, unflinching collection of poems about girlhood, wonder, casual everyday violence."
Yrsa Daley-Ward, author of 'bone' and 'The Terrible'

In this multi-faceted collection of odes, anecdotes, sonnets and prose, Olivia Gatwood weaves together the trials and triumphs of growing up and explores the many ways that fear and violence can be internalized in a woman's psyche. At times blistering and riotous, at times soulful and exuberant, Life of the Party is about what it means to be a girl and a woman in today’s world and the challenge of briefly being both.

In powerful, piercingly candid language, Gatwood asks: How does one grow from a girl to a woman in a world wracked by violence? What happens to our bodies that make us who we are? Is this fear really irrational?

A dazzling collection of raw and explosive poems from a thrilling new feminist voice.