Which of my books should you read?
I have written four poetry collections, and although they all live somewhere in the same mossy, moonlit ecosystem, they each came from a different season of my life.
The first three, Secrets & Stars, Bread Sex Trees, and Hermit Season, became an accidental trilogy. I think of them now as the Maiden, the Mother, and the Mage: three books about becoming, loving, losing, resting, and learning how to inhabit your own life.
My fourth book, Quietly Wild, opens the door a little wider. Alongside poetry, it includes my photography and seasonal rituals, and was designed to accompany you through an entire year.
So, where should you begin?
The short answer
Choose Secrets & Stars if you are wandering through the dark, falling in love with yourself again, or have always suspected the moon and the foxes know something you don’t.
Choose Bread Sex Trees if you want poems about love, grief, bodies, family, desire, death, trees, and the stubborn beauty that persists through all of it.
Choose Hermit Season if you are tired, changing, healing, or standing in the liminal place between who you were and whoever you are becoming.
Choose Quietly Wild if you want poetry to become part of the way you move through the year, and you love photographs, rituals, seasons, creative practice, and the living world.
Or keep reading and I’ll tell you a little more.
The books
Quietly Wild
For the ones who want to live closer to the Earth
Quietly Wild is my most expansive book, and probably the easiest place to begin if you want to experience the full landscape of my work.
It contains 120 poems, ten for every month of the year, alongside more than forty of my photographs and simple seasonal rituals for marking solstices, equinoxes, and the quieter thresholds in between.
This might be your book if you love nature writing, Mary Oliver, photography, changing seasons, creative ritual, earth-centered spirituality, beautiful books, or simply paying closer attention to the world.
It also makes a particularly lovely gift for someone whose exact poetry preferences you don’t yet know.
poetry, photography, and rituals to mark the seasons
Bread Sex Trees
For the ones trying to love this beautiful, impossible life
Bread Sex Trees asks the question: how do we remain open to beauty when grief has changed the shape of the world?
Written through a period of profound loss and change, these poems move through love, death, sex, family, nature, spirituality, identity, and the complicated work of remaining alive to pleasure. The collection follows the wheel of the year, allowing the seasons to carry some of what cannot be neatly resolved.
This is probably the place I would send someone who already loves contemporary poetry and wants the widest emotional range of my earlier work.
There is darkness here, but there is also bread on the table, skin against skin, pressed flowers, old scars, trees overhead, and the persistent possibility of joy.
Hermit Season
For the ones who need some time alone
There are periods of life when forward motion ceases to be particularly useful.
Hermit Season grew out of one of those periods for me. After years of change, grief, sobriety, caregiving, work, parenting, loss, and reinvention, I needed to stop long enough to understand who I had become.
The poems in this collection turn inward. They are interested in dreams, intuition, rest, mystery, winter, the unseen world, and the long process of integrating a life.
Read Hermit Season when you are between chapters.
This might be your book if you love winter, tarot, dreams, deep water, solitude, spiritual seeking, mysterious images, or permission to take a creative rest.
Secrets & Stars
For the ones learning to choose themselves
Secrets & Stars was my first poetry collection and it contains some of my deepest shadows and rawest thoughts.
Read Secrets & Stars when you want poetry that feels a little witchy, a little feral, a little celestial, and emotionally intimate.
This might be your book if you love dark woods, mythology, shadow work, complicated families, feminine wildness, night skies, and poems that are willing to follow a feeling all the way down.