Are despair and suicide the special province of poets? This week, hearing the news of Reetika Vazirani’s death by apparent suicide (and the killing of her young son Jehan Vazirani Komunyakaa), we cannot help but ponder the connections... The story is in two articles in The Washington Post: “In Final Hours, Despair Defeated Poet” & “The Unique and Familiar Story Of a Poet’s Death, Creative Minds Often Linked To Depression and Suicide.”

You can use these links to read some of Vazirani’s work:

• her Web chapbook at The Literary Review
• her page at the Academy of American Poets site (poets.org)
• her Poet of the Month page at PoetryNet

Then stop in at the Poetry Forum, where we've opened a conversation on poets and suicide: “Sylvia Plath, Hart Crane, Randall Jarrell, Anne Sexton... all poets who took their own lives.... what do you make of these connections?”