Molly Peacock

Molly Peacock is a widely anthologized poet, biographer, memoirist, and transplanted New Yorker to Toronto, her adopted city. Her latest work of nonfiction is FLOWER DIARY: MARY HIESTER REID PAINTS, TRAVELS, MARRIES & OPENS A DOOR, published by ECW Press in 2021. “In prose as subtle and enchanting as Mary Hiester Reid’s own brushstrokes, FLOWER DIARY paints a compelling portrait of a talented and unjustly neglected painter. Molly Peacock is unfailingly sensitive and intelligent, and at times deeply moving, as she shows how, despite the shade of domestic life and the unfavorable climate of the times, Mary Hiester Reid brought forth her bright blossoms,” writes Ross King. As with THE PAPER GARDEN: MRS. DELANY BEGINS HER LIFE’S WORK AT 72, a Canadian bestseller and an Economist Book of the Year, published in the US, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, Peacock merges memoir with biography, sharing details of her own life and marriage with the late James Joyce scholar, Michael Groden.

Her seventh book of poems is THE ANALYST, a sequence about her psychoanalyst who became a painter after surviving a stroke (W.W. Norton and Company.) 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). She is noted as a formalist poet whose persona acts as a witness to the vagaries of human relationships, declaring, "There must be room in love for hate."  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 prose poems and short short fiction with ALPHABETIQUE: 26 CHARACTERISTIC FICTIONS illustrated by Kara Kosaka. (McClelland & Stewart).

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. Her other works include a memoir about her choice not to have children, PARADISE, PIECE BY PIECE, and a one-woman show in poems, THE SHIMMERING VERGE. She edited THE PRIVATE I: PRIVACY IN A PUBLIC WORLD and POETRY IN MOTION: 100 POEMS FROM THE SUBWAYS AND BUSES.