New Poetry Book

My mother has written a poem every morning for nearly twenty years. In April of 2012 she decided to lead a “poem a day challenge” for writers in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts where I grew up. The inspiration quickly spread and soon people across the country were joining in. Each morning mom would send out a poetry assignment, a starting prompt for our poem of the day. We then had to craft something with the only time we had that morning. Not trying to be perfect or polished, simply putting our pens to paper. I released my first book of poems, “The Morning I Was Born” as a result of that month.

These new poems are the result of another month of mom’s inspiration. They mark early passage into mid-life with its sorrows and its mysteries and its grief and its questions and its soul-stirring cry.

If we’re paying attention, it seems that mid-life arrives at our doorsteps with the perfect combination of memory and pain and openness and restlessness and a longing for something to shift inside us. If we surrender to that longing, in good faith, it has the capacity to change us.