Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and grew up in Detroit and Baltimore. She was educated at Harvard and Cambridge Universities and worked as a staff editor at The Atlantic Monthly and as poetry editor of The New Republic. A vice president of the Poetry Society of America, she is also a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. In addition to her five poetry collections, she is the author of a children's book, The Moon Comes Home. She is Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer at Mount Holyoke College and lives with her family in Amherst, Massachusetts.
<b>Open Shutters</b> (2003) [Salter] . . . challenges us with the discovery that something lucid, forthright, and fantastically undisheveled might also be sublime. Stephen Metcalf, <i>New York Times Book Review Salter . . . performs with deep pleasure and arresting artistry the paired arts of avid observation and the transformation of hectic experience into crystalline images, golden threads of narrative, and startling extrapolations . . Salter s moves are so precise and gravity-defying, so astonishingly eloquent, the exhilarated reader feels as though she s watching a gymnast perform intricate, risky, and unpredictable sequences, nailing each one perfectly. Donna Seaman, <i>Booklist A mature poet at the top of her form. . . Delightful. Rochelle Ratner, <i>Library Journal</i> <b>A Kiss in Space</b><i> </i>(1999) The book of poetry I loved best this year was<b> A Kiss in Space</b>, full of moving adventurous work. Les Murray, <i>Times Literary Supplement These are poems of breathtaking elegance: in formal control, in intellectual subtlety, in learning lightly displayed. Carolyn Kizer <i><b>Sunday Skaters (</b>1994)<i> A beautiful book, a major phase in the career of an important poet . . . In these poems a quality of close but apparently effortless observation is backed up by a strong and deep moral sense. Henry Taylor<b>Unfinished Painting</b><i> </i>(1989) Mary Jo Salter s work embodies the marriage of superb craftsmanship to the tragic sense of reality, which is the formula of true poetry. Joseph Brodsky <b>Henry Purcell in Japan</b><i> </i>(1985) A poetry full of alertness, tact, credible feeling, and an unforced gaiety of form . . . For all her modesty of tone, she has a range of awareness and response, which, in a time when much poetry has shrunk to the merely personal, is refreshingly large. Richard Wilbur <i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>