"I sort of see you surrounded with fine-tooth combs, sandpaper, nail files, pots of varnish, etc.—with heaps of used commas and semicolons handy, and little useless phrases taken out of their contexts and dying all over the floor," Elizabeth Bishop said upon learning a friend landed a job at The New Yorker in the early 1950s. From 1933 until her death in 1979, during which time she won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Poetry and served a term as the poet laureate of the United States, Bishop published the majority of her poems in The New Yorker. Hundreds of letters passed between Bishop and editors Charles Pearce, Katharine S. White, and Howard Moss, and these fascinating correspondences are collected here, offering us a remarkable view into Bishop's writing process, the relationship between a poet and her editors, the internal workings of the magazine, and how a poem is published.