A haunting, luminous poetry collection.
Award-winning poet and essayist Streetly charts a life changed by loss, memory, and the magnetic pull of the Pacific Northwest in her compelling latest book. Six years after her adult stepsons vanished with their boat near Tofino, she returns to the Tla-o-qui-aht territory where she once lived with them and their father. The island—remote, wind-scoured, and saturated with history—anchors the collection. Early poems recall her first summers there, including that firelit meal when “I don’t know things yet,” capturing the innocence that preceded the deeper complexities of her life. The boys’ disappearance reverberates through the book. In “Gyre,” she confesses, “I did have stepsons. No, I should say I do,” and later, “Every time I look they are somewhere else”—lines that distill the ache of unresolved grief. “This Ocean in Me” deepens the emotional undertow: “my throat is a question mark/ crooked above the knot of/ can’t breathe.”
Streetly also writes with stark honesty about trauma and the body’s long memory. In “m—,” she recalls, “I was supposed to say me too/—I was, I am, I tried,/ wanted to—couldn’t repeat,” a moment that reveals how speech collapses under the weight of experience. “Salvage” offers a later transformation, her voice steadying as “my body will feel the astonishing weight/ of that forgotten self.” The natural world—kelp beds, whales, winter tides—remains her constant witness. In “Fugue for the Mounded Earth,” she writes, “when at last there are bones in a place/ bones you belong to,” threading land and lineage with quiet grace. Ultimately, the book invites readers to accept uncertainty rather than chase tidy conclusions. Loss stays unresolved. Healing moves in loops. Who we are keeps evolving under pressures larger than us. Even so, the poems offer a small comfort: we can transform through pain without letting it define us.
Part elegy, part reclamation, this is a profound meditation on how love, grief, and place shape a life.
Caitlin Press Inc.
Pub date March 19, 2026
ISBN 978-1773861722
Price $15.00 (USD) Paperback
