Books like What the Living Do by Marie Howe

Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s poignant memoir chronicles his battle with stage IV metastatic lung cancer and his reflections on life, medicine, and mortality.

C.S. Lewis’s personal journal of grief following his wife’s death, offering reflective meditations on loss, faith, and the quest for meaning.

A collection of Christian love poems by American poet Calvin Miller.

Deborah Levy’s memoir, The Cost of Living, interrogates the social limits imposed on women and the yearning for a self‑authored life, weaving reflections on feminism and literary influences.

A bold exploration of pregnancy, childbirth, and artistic expression through verse, prose, and dialogue.

"On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since. She has written an engrossing, unsentimental, beautifully poised account: as she struggles through the first months following the tragedy, furiously clenched against a reality that she cannot face and cannot deny; and then, over the ensuing years, as she emerges reluctantly, slowly allowing her memory to take her back through the rich and joyous life she’s mourning, from her family’s home in London, to the birth of her children, to the year she met her English husband at Cambridge, to her childhood in Colombo; all the while learning the difficult balance between the almost unbearable reminders of her loss and the need to keep her family, somehow, still alive within her"--From publisher's website.

The Bright Hour is a moving memoir in which poet Nina Riggs chronicles her life with terminal breast cancer, exploring how to live fully amid death, illness, and the emotional landscape of being a mother and patient.

Fanny Howe's new collection presents a portrait painted from the inside of the life of a homeless woman. The poems speak in the voice of May, the girl crossed out, the bad girl, the mad and drunk girl, the jailed and drugged girl. May is swirling in language, and the language convinces us that we really are deep in the core of a human consciousness, near the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. May is a neonomad, bringing to the world the opposite of worldliness, offering a glimpse of the invisible.

Celebrating 50 Years of Poetic Genius

Anjail Rashida Ahmad's powerful exploration of African American women's heritage and pride in language and tradition.