If you tasted Milford's biography of Zelda as a girl (all my friends did), you'll devour this life of a woman who did not burn up in an insane asylum (Zelda) but rather who won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry and who was loved and loved in return (Millay). Poems, lovers, loved-other-ones, drugs, so many demons run to ground and finally the demon that gets you--but not before she slashes across its face this scar of poetry: "Handsome, this day: no matter who has died." This is a feast of a book.
Alice Randall is the author of The Wind Done Gone, which Houghton Mifflin will publish in paperback this April.
