A Death in the Family (1957), by James Agee, is a tragic tale of the effect of a man's death on his family.

For a comparative study of American poetry, read Richard Howard's Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950 (1980).

Gioia dedicated The Gods of Winter (1991) to his son who died from sudden infant death syndrome. Several of the poems in the volume deal with the subject of death.

Gioia's essay “Can Poetry Matter?,” published in Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture (2002), presents his controversial views of the status of poetry in America in the early part of the twenty-first century.