Inferno (A Poet's Novel)

A young writer enters New York's poetry world and begins to discover how artistic ambition and desire can shape a life together. Drawing on autobiography while refusing the tidy boundaries of a conventional memoir, Inferno moves through the city's readings, friendships, performances, and precarious creative work. Its narrator considers the making of poems alongside the making of a lesbian identity, finding neither process separate from the people and places around her. The book's shifting structure turns a career narrative into something more unruly and intimate. Becoming an artist involves money, recognition, failure, and persistence, but also learning what kind of attention makes a life feel fully inhabited.