In ‘The Poetry of Suicide,’ J. T. Welsch interweaves stories of poets who took their own lives with the long history of suicide in his own family, searching for a new way of understanding these difficult deaths.

Beginning with Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be?’, he delves into the work of Dante, Sylvia Plath, Vladimir Mayakovsky and others, asking what it can teach us about suicide’s messy reality.

J. T. Welsch is a writer and academic born in the US and based in the UK, where he teaches at the University of York. He is the author of several books of and about poetry, including Orchids (2010), The Hell Creek Anthology (2015) and The Selling and Self-Regulation of Contemporary Poetry (2020). He also edited the anthology of migrant poetry Wretched Strangers (2018) with Ágnes Lehóczky. His writing has appeared in Poetry Review, Boston Review and the Guardian.

Recovering the personal dimension often lost in our medicalised public discourse, Welsch finds practical ways of confronting suicide’s poem-like difficulties.