In late April 2017, Laura Apol’s twenty-six-year-old daughter, Hanna, took her own life. Apol had long believed in the therapeutic possibilities of writing, having conducted workshops on writing-for-healing for more than a decade. Yet after Hanna’s death, she had her own therapeutic writing to do, turning her anguish, disbelief, and love into poems that map the first year of loss. This collection is the result of that writing, giving voice to grief as it is lived, moment by moment, memory by memory, event by event. While most writing about loss does so from a distance, Apol chooses instead to write from inside those days and months and seasons, allowing readers to experience alongside the poet the moments, the questions, and the deep longings that shape the first grief-year.

LAURA APOL is the author of several collections of poetry, including Falling into Grace; Crossing the Ladder of Sun; Requiem, Rwanda; and Nothing but the Blood, winner of the 2019 Oklahoma Book Award for poetry and the 2019 Independent Publisher Award silver medal for poetry. She currently serves as the poet laureate for the Lansing area in mid-Michigan.