In The Thaw of Day

In The Thaw of Day chronicles the aftermath-what it's like to leave a marriage torn apart by rage and substance abuse. In the midst of divorce, the poet was also by her mother's side as she lay dying. After burying her mother, she relocated as a newly single woman to Mexico. Alone for the first time in more than half her life, she rented out her home to pay the bills and learned new skills fast to stay afloat: preparing for hurricanes, managing invading bats, exterminating snakes, and evading a growing population of witch moths. The speaker in these poems comes to terms with trauma experienced over a lifetime, taking readers on a journey of recovery while finding deep meaning and joy in the smallest things: ...the ocean, sky, dirt and air, and space // between my cells... as she grapples with big questions including impermanence and why we are here, how the wind off the Seine /crawls under your scarf. The black / and white photo from the museum, / an image of Basquiat between us / tells me Basquiat is dead, / and in this photo, all of us are memory. The collection is bursting with the natural world, filled with whales and wild mushrooms, taking the reader from Paris and Mexico to Los Angeles, Atlanta and the moon! The book looks at grief following the loss of the poet's long marriage, the death of her mother, and her father to suicide, while always finding something to be thankful for, even if it's, the way a leaf / still shudders after the wind.