From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Paper Palace, a Reese’s Book Club Pick, comes a debut poetry collection that paints a moving portrait of a rich life from childhood to love to marriage to motherhood to divorce and beyond. 

What the Deep Water Knows by Miranda Cowley Heller is a series of exquisite reflections on love in all its seasons. In poetry that is lyrical and quick-witted, gentle and devastatingly frank, Cowley Heller contemplates time, marriage, and motherhood. Her words will envelop you and bring you to the water’s emotional edge:

“I stand in bare feet at the break,

icy water soaking my cuffs.

A scoop of pelicans dives on bait fish

– relentless, cruel.

Kelp fronds mourn them in the glassy deep.

A hermit crab creeping on to shore

skittles its way across the sand.

In the blue, a soot tern wings loop-the-loops.

And I lift my face into the wind.”

from “Things the Tide Has Discarded”