Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them

Poetry gathers our lives, containing everything we hold inside. If poetry is a container, a place to gather what keeps us alive, what feeds our joy, and eases our sorrow, it is a communal basket, and it is often held by women. Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them is a collection of poems exploring what women hold, what they keep, and how they let go- of sorrow, loss and grief. Using the natural world as buffer, Ellen Stone writes poems exploring motherhood and mental illness, sexual assault, marriage and parenthood-as well as how loss filters down through family generations. The poems investigate daughters leaving home while trying to carry home within them. The moon is the mother in the book, waxing and waning, but always there, always coming back around.

Ellen Stone possesses the enviable abilities to track the shifting intimacies between mothers and daughters and to summon forth startling imagery to describe the world. In her poems, mothering is attentiveness to others, to the self, and to change. Her poems are grounded in the mountains or the savannah; trees and animals co-exist with grief and grace. Her language-supple, radiant-reminds us love is never static; it redeems, it falters, it soars. I deeply admire the heart and the craft of these poems. - Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine