What the Deep Water Knows

Coming July 1, 2025

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”

Coming July 1, 2025

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”