Robert Coles is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, a leading child psychiatrist, a compassionate and thoughtful essayist, and a sensitive, deeply moving poet. In his days as a medical student he had the good fortune to know Dr. William Carlos Williams, an experience which has remained lasting for Dr. Coles–and which has inspired Rumors of Separate Worlds.

Coles describes this volume of reflective poetry best, calling it a mind’s struggle to make sense of the world’s apparently limitless ironies, ambiguities, contradictions, not to mention its fatefulness, the rule of luck, the reign of the arbitrary, the accidental in our lives. Rumors of Separate Worlds aptly represents the life of one of our most humane and important writers and thinkers.