'Jean Stafford passed over the literary landscape of her day like some bright but wounded butterfly. Driven and self-destructive, yet wielding a scalpel-edged prose, she is often corralled with the Icarus generation of poets that included Robert Lowell (to whom she was famously married), John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Randall Jarrell. All of them, it's true, felt the brush of the wing of madness, and their collective biography is rife with alcoholism, manic episodes, adultery, and, in several instances, suicide.' --Sven Birkerts, Mirabella