Molly Peacock is a widely anthologized poet, biographer, memoirist, and New Yorker transplanted to Toronto, her adopted city.
Her newest biography is FLOWER DIARY: IN WHICH MARY HIESTER REID PAINTS, TRAVELS, MARRIES & OPENS A DOOR (ECW Press). “Part memoir, part biography, this is a beautifully written and layered volume that opens its arms wide and encompasses art, domesticity, the intimacy of marriage and of death. Lush and beautifully produced,” Sue Carter wrote in the Toronto Star. This layered memoir and biography examines the balancing act of female creativity and domesticity in the life of Mary Hiester Reid, a painter who produced over three hundred stunning, emotive floral still lifes and landscapes. This lush and beautifully produced treatise also tracks Peacock’s own marriage with the late Joyce scholar Michael Groden.
FLOWER DIARY is a companion of sorts to THE PAPER GARDEN: MRS. DELANY BEGINS HER LIFE’S WORK AT 72, a Canadian bestseller, named a Book of the Year by The Economist, The Globe and Mail, The Irish Times, The London Evening Standard and Booklist, published in the US, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. “Like her glorious and multilayered collages, Delany is so vivid a character she almost jumps from the page,” Andrea Wulf wrote in The New York Times Book Review.
Molly’s most recent book of poems is THE ANALYST (W.W. Norton & Company) where she takes up a unique task: telling the story of her psychotherapist who survived a stroke by reconnecting with her girlhood talent for painting. Her previous volumes include THE SECOND BLUSH, CORNUCOPIA: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (both from W. W. Norton and Company); TAKE HEART, RAW HEAVEN (both from Random House); and AND LIVE APART (University of Missouri Press). The New York Times Book Review writes: “Ms. Peacock uses rhyme and meter as a way to cut reality into sizeable chunks, the sense of the poem spilling from line to line, breathlessly.” The Washington Post writes: "Rich music follows the beat of Molly Peacock's baton."
Molly ventured into short fiction with ALPHABETIQUE: 26 CHARACTERISTIC FICTIONS magically illustrated by Kara Kosaka, published by McClelland & Stewart. Her memoir, PARADISE, PIECE BY PIECE, about her choice not to have children, is now an e-book. Molly is one of the subjects of Renee McCormick’s documentary, A LIFE WITHOUT CONVENTION, https://vimeo.com/178503153.
As a New Yorker, she helped create Poetry in Motion on the subways and buses; in Toronto she founded THE BEST CANADIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH. Molly lives and works in Toronto, but returns to New York City each spring to teach at the 92nd Street Y.
