Singing from the Deep End

Singing from the Deep End is an exploration of girlhood, womanhood, and motherhood, with all the attendant splendors and perils. Deeply rooted in the geography of Massachusetts, Olander’s poems seek to enact the very process of becoming, a process that is both mysterious and inexorable. “How could I pin anything / to a page, when to be alive [is] an exercise in being lost?” the poet wonders. However, with tender description and memorable music, the spirit of delight prevails, keeping poet and poems aloft. “How / gorgeous and glowing it is to be human,” she declares. Through the many transitions that shape a woman’s life, Olander has “learned the alchemy / of mothers, turning base metals into gold.”
 

-- Kirun Kapur, author of Women in the Waiting Room

Rebecca Olander’s Singing from the Deep End is a series of love letters penned with a sense of what’s at stake when we confess to the power others have over our hearts, that organ Olander describes as a “bucket on a rope I lower in secret.” Because Olander knows that loving—which is the simultaneous expression of need and wonder—can be rewarded with pain, these poems brim with not only the ocean’s heaving salt but the salt of forgiveness, too. If Olander’s childhood taught her to be a liar, as she conjectures in one poem, I don’t want her to stop telling me these tender, brilliant lies dressed as they are in the finery of indelible truth.
 

-- Keetje Kuipers, author of Lonely Women Make Good Lovers

Rebecca Hart Olander makes me cry. Every. Damn. Time. Divided into three parts of equal emotional weight, this achingly beautiful book traverses a girlhood with an awe-inspiring monarch of a mother; the grace and grief of a lifelong friendship curtailed by illness; and finally, a turn to mothering one’s own children. Through it all, there is “Something about luck holding, / like a patch on a worn sleeve, a plug in a leaky boat.” How quickly Olander takes me from being captivated by the craft to becoming completely choked up by the sheer humanity. I love this book.
 

-- Nicole Callihan, author of