I’M EXCITED TO ANNOUNCE

My new book, The Sky Weeps with Us, will be released by Finishing Line Press in January 2025. Isn’t the cover beautiful? I took that picture on Santorini, and I’m pretty proud of myself!!

Writing a book is such a strange experience. People venerate it, universities are dedicated to helping people write and create, books are written about how to do it, but really, it’s about writing one poem and then another—or one chapter and then another—and seeing if they fit together, a sort of plodding along.

I wrote the poems in this book during and after COVID. Over the past five years, my husband and I have lost almost a dozen friends and family members. Not a single one to COVID, but lots to cancer and heart disease and kidney disease. Some of them were only in their forties, far too young to be stricken by these illnesses. Shortly after my father died (which was at the beginning of COVID), my friend Carol called to tell me she had pancreatic cancer. Van and I were dealing with his treatment for prostate cancer at the time. I said to a friend: “It has to stop.” And she replied, “No, it doesn’t.” Grief piles on—and how does one carry it?

The poems in this new collection tackle grief—how it felt to me, how we navigate it, and how we come through it into a new sense of ourselves—or maybe it’s just the old self but more battle worn because it feels to me as if each person who died took a little piece of me with them, some part of myself that only they knew, some experience only we shared and no one else.

I wrote many of the poems as prose poems in long sentences, because that’s how the grief felt, like one long cry to a God who may or may not be listening, who has a whole lot of other people in pain to hear. Last night at Writers in Conversation, poet Emily Hockaday, who has written beautifully about losing her father, talked about how a grieving person can feel societal limits on the expression of grief, as if there’s a time limit on how long it takes to mourn a person. She also (her terrific books are Blood Music and In a Body) wrote a beautiful blurb for the back of my book:

Laurel Peterson’s haunting chapbook is a lyrical account of people disappearing—removed from the world as if by magic. The poems are exquisitely rendered—we notice the squirrels, the sounds of vehicles on the road, a well-stocked pantry. The people in these poems can no more comprehend death than we, the reader, and The Sky Weeps with Us deftly replicates that disorientation and denial. Everything is ephemeral, precarious in these poems. Each text message is in danger of being the last. The fog could seemingly eat a person whole and never spit them out. Throughout these meditations on grief, the mundane nature of death and its incomprehensibility is nimbly woven into the everyday, with the shadow of COVID lockdown looming large. Maybe we all are the crumbling artifact in “Filling the Birdbath,” with “thirty years of soft feathers/fluttering in its mouth at twilight.” All who have grieved will find comfort in this collection. The questions in the poems echo in all of us. And maybe in that questioning there is communion. In the closing poem “How to Grieve,” the speaker acknowledges the double edge to grief. It is sharp in contrast to “. . . gratitude,/ that generosity toward the world . . .”

Mine has never been the most important grief to anyone but me, and it pales in comparison to those who have lost loved ones to war or gun violence or injustice of any kind. But maybe my voice will help others feel heard. Maybe it will help you feel that however long it takes to grieve whatever you are grieving—country, loved ones, justice, job loss, personal illness, emotional pain—is just fine. And there is gratitude for this beautiful world on the other side.

Thanks for reading.

If you’re so inclined, you can purchase my book here. You can also click on the QR code in the image below, and it will take you to Finishing Line’s website. Preorders matter a lot, and I’m grateful for every one.

Events:

I will be reading at Manhattanville University’s MFA Alumni reading on Saturday, October 4, from 4 - 6 PM. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with others from the program and hearing their work! All are welcome.

Writers in Conversation, October 16, 6:30 PM at the Norwalk Public Library, Norwalk, CT will showcase Jennifer Franklin and Iain Haley Pollock. Jennifer writes about motherhood, autism, and family through the lens of Greek myth in her latest collection If Some God Shakes Your House, while Iain tackles what it means to be black in America right now. These are two powerful writers, and I hope you can join us. Feel free to contact me for more information.