Waiting for a book to come out is nothing like waiting for a baby to be born. I have done both, so I know. Yet, one is drawn to make comparisons, particularly in terms of how time stretches longer than the calendar accounts for, and how one goes from a state of uneasy boredom to giddiness. As I say, comparisons of this sort are meaningless. One doesn’t know one’s baby in advance. One’s book is thoroughly known. All it lacks is how readers will receive it, and this uncertainty can weigh.

My new poetry collection, The Banished and the Dead, arrives March 27, 2026, about three and a half months from now. It’s a beautiful book. Every author says that about her work, but that doesn’t make my remark less true. Readers and reviewers may not agree and that’s okay, because the beauty for me is that this book, like all my others, was inspired by something I carried for a long time.

Grief is not just about what you lose, it’s also about things you never had and whose absence never eases. I was born into a family where everyone was looking for a way out. My father, deeply devoted to my mother, discovered that she was desperately in love with someone else who didn’t return her affection. My mother wanted out of her life generally – she never wanted to marry, and despite what she said about wanting children, her behavior proved otherwise. The exit my sister, R, wanted was from me. This last was in many ways the most difficult, because my parents, for whatever their faults and the ways they tried to change their lives for the better, had some affection for me. R had none. From the moment I was born she saw me as an enemy, a rival, something to be destroyed and removed.

R is six and a half years older than I. A five-year-old looks up to an eleven-year-old. An eleven-year-old with serious behavioral problems and enough hostility to sink a navy can do great harm to a five-year-old. She did, daily. Being told by someone I admired that I was ugly, deficient, deformed, and unwelcome was hard on my developing ego. But abuse isn’t always immediately obvious, I learned. An abuser can tone down the assault, be subtle, so as to blend in and hide in plain sight. R employed these tactics, pretending to be kind and caring, then pulling that rug out from under me by betraying what I hoped was true. Over the intervening decades some part of me kept wanting her to come around, be a true friend, be on my side. It never happened. I would hear again and again from someone else in the family names she’d called me, insults she reveled in. Finally, I broke contact.

Not long ago, I heard from a friend about a visit she had with her sister and how much fun they’d had. It was a foreign language; one I didn’t understand but which evoked dreadful longing. I expect that will always be so. Grief is accepting that the living can be dead to us, and this is a central theme in The Banished and the Dead.

I leave you with a poem from the collection, “This is the Year.”

The morning lifts its yellow-white soul through the trees
Bathing the Douglas Firs with light
Behind them the sky hangs in willful darkness,
Pulled by clouds needing to be on their way
Out there, over the water
Taking along a wish here, a hope there
This is the year my grieving will end
And rage will settle in the warming ground
A resolution not in my hands to shape
But not in anyone else’s either
Sorrow is its own master
I, its subject
Time for a tiny rebellion,
Quick laughter, a stupid joke
Let it go, I say
Let me go with it