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About the Book

Paris Paint Box, New and Selected Poems, brings together over forty-five years of poetry by Helena Minton. The book opens with a sequence about the life and work of the French Impressionist painter, Berthe Morisot. Additional new poems focus on everyday moments, and meditations on the past. In selections from her previous work, poems touch on family, gardens, New England history and landscapes, and the Alaska wilderness. In a quiet but determined voice, the poet draws the reader into her world with direct, spare language and a keen eye to detail.

A Note on the Author

Helena Minton’s previous collections include The Canal Bed with Alice James Books, The Gardener and the Bees with March Street Press, and The Raincoat Colors with Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including The Beloit Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, The Listening Eye, Sou’wester, Poetry, West Branch, Nasty Women Poets, An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, and Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace. She worked for many years as the director of a public library and has also taught English Composition and Creative Writing. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst and serves on the Board of the Robert Frost Foundation, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. She lives north of Boston.

Praise for Paris Paint Box

Helena Minton's Paris Paint Box is a fascinating history of one poet's imaginative travels, inward and outward into the world. The book is a curated gathering of new and uncollected poems, along with a generous selection from Minton's four previous books. And at its heart are the luminous poems that comprise the title section, a paint box of vignettes that limn the contours of the life and work of Impressionist painter, Berthe Morisot. It is a biography both researched and imagined, a pleasure to the senses, and deepened by the tensile connections Minton recognizes exist between mothers and daughters, her own and Morisot's.
—Marie Harris, author of Your Sun, Manny and Desirelines

“These beautiful poems are both sensual and spare, performing one of poetry’s most urgent tasks, to show us what is before our eyes and what to our peril we so easily miss—”

Betsy Sholl, Author of Late Psalm and House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems

“Minton draws our attention, through metaphors of art and nature, to a series of likenesses that otherwise can’t be named.”

Joyce Peseroff, author of Know Thyself and Petition