What the Deep Water Knows

Miranda Cowley Heller
What the Deep Water Knows

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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”

Buy Audiobook

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”

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Meet the Author

Miranda Cowley Heller

Miranda Cowley Heller has worked as senior vice president and head of drama series at HBO, developing and overseeing such shows as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, and Big Love, among others. This is her first novel. She grew up spending summers on Cape Cod, and now lives in California.

What people are saying...

"A breathtaking collection. These poems map a woman’s life with extraordinary precision and skill. Heartbreaking, funny, poignant, hopeful . . . this is poetry you didn’t know you needed but will change the way you see the world.”

Daisy Goodwin

author of The American Heiress

“Raw and intimate . . . full of female life—a note scribbled to a son, a hummingbird in the garden, a lover walking away. Surprising and captivating.”

Jenny Jackson

author of Pineapple Street

"How I loved this. A collection of poems that manages to capture a woman’s life in its entirety with all its joy, mystery, and harsh, unexpected endings. What the Deep Water Knows broke my heart and healed it too. Fans of The Paper Palace will adore it."

Clare Leslie Hall

author of Broken Country

“Miranda’s poems are living, breathing words that are raw, honest, and thought-provoking. Reading this collection felt like a key turning a tiny hidden lock within. Her poems are brilliant and intentional, you will no doubt come back to these pages time and time again.”

Jessica Urlichs

author of Beautiful Chaos

“Takes you on a shiningly intimate journey . . . Silken and barbed all at once.”

Yael van der Wouden

author of The Safekeep

“A life told in astonishing, unerring verses. The early poems are beautifully opaque, stones glimpsed in cloudy water. Lyrical, brutal, devastating, visionary—through verse a woman’s life emerges, gathers itself, is dismantled, and settles again. These stories are as precise and arresting as icy water.”

Sonya Walger

author of Lion