Singing from the Deep End

An intimate collection of poems about mothers and daughters, female friendship, and memory. Rebecca Hart Olander's second poetry collection, Singing from the Deep End, chronicles coming of age in the '70s and '80s with a single mother, girlhood friends, the death of a dearest friend, and the poet's own dive into motherhood. Rooted in the rocky coastline of Gloucester, Massachusetts, these poems thrum with music, mirrors, granite quarries, the Atlantic, potholder looms, feathered hair, and repurposed garments. Singing from the Deep End navigates how our ever-changing bodies can betray us and be betrayed, treading through layered griefs and surfacing into joy and reclamation. Anchored in the lives of women, this poetic mixtape is a love song to mothers, children, girlhood, and friendship.

Table of Contents:
Cape Ann I. Riding Lessons Book of Changes Attachment The Mirror Building Turtle This Bird Has Flown Origin Girls. I Knew. I Was. What Heidi Knew The Early Intimacy of Gwen and Me Three Lies and a Truth Unearthing and Burying My Old Friend Jennifer with a Golden Shovel On Learning to Say No Alita Darcy Balance Beam Fifteen Ode to a Girlhood Bedroom One Reason I Become an English Teacher Wrecked, Off Pavilion Beach Gloucester Music Brackett’s Quarry To the One Who Braved the Snake to Keep Me Safe II. The Jerica Poems Swim Lessons Mass on the Mammogram After Her Diagnosis, I Think of Italy On the Carrer de Mallorca in Spain One Long-Ago Winter Besieged Castle My Toddler Godson in the Yard in May Winter Trees First Party After His Mother Died Pandemic Mammogram Maid of Honor The Last As Bees Anniversary Grief Wildwood Cemetery Declaration III. Carrying Lessons Old Pelham Road Hurricane Necklace The Conception of Immaculate Thinking About Why Sylvia Didn’t Tell the Hunter About the Nest Writing in the Car While the Teens Battle on Game Night To My Daughter, Departing for Indonesia Malum On Mothering, Mortality, and the Wankel T. rex Offspring Inheritance Human Hours Concerning the Marble on My Mother’s Kidney First Day in Iceland with My Mother and Daughter My Decidua Beavers Never Want to Live a Different Life The Mousetrap Considering Delores Dóttir Telling the Bees Notes Acknowledgments

About the Author :
Rebecca Hart Olander is the author of Dressing the Wounds, Uncertain Acrobats, and Singing from the Deep End. She has taught poetry at Amherst College, Smith College, Westfield State University, and through graduate and community writing programs. She is the editor and director of Perugia Press, a nonprofit feminist press publishing first and second full-length books of poetry by women.