Singing from the Deep End

Coming February 3rd, 2026 - Books will ship the final week of January
Preorder now!

Rebecca Hart Olander’s second collection, Singing from the Deep End, chronicles coming of age in the ’70s and ’80s with a single mother, girlhood friends, the death of a dearest friend, and the poet’s own dive into motherhood. Rooted in the rocky coastline of Gloucester, Massachusetts, these poems thrum with music, mirrors, granite quarries, the Atlantic, potholder looms, feathered hair, and repurposed garments. Singing from the Deep End navigates how our ever-changing bodies can betray us and be betrayed, treading through layered griefs and surfacing into joy and reclamation. Anchored in the lives of women, this poetic mixtape is a love song to mothers, children, girldom, and friendship.

Rebecca Hart Olander’s poetry and collaborative writing and collage have appeared in print, online, and in multiple anthologies. Her previous books include Dressing the Wounds (dancing girl press, 2019) and Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press, 2021), a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry and the Massachusetts Book Award. A winner of the Women’s National Book Association Poetry Award, Rebecca has taught poetry widely, including at Amherst and Smith colleges, Westfield State University, and through graduate and community writing programs. She is the editor/director of Perugia Press, a nonprofit feminist press publishing first and second full-length books of poetry by women.

from Attachment

Our mother lived as she wanted life to be. Did that teach me

to be an optimist? A liar? A poet? I learned the alchemy
of mothers, turning base metals into gold.
Faith in most people’s goodness, despite evidence

to the contrary. How to hold a lost thing in mind,
tumble it over and again like a multifaceted gem.
Remember its color. Its cut. I miss my girlhood,

and I miss my grandmother. But I can picture the pleather
handle of that portable wardrobe. Trace those tiny stitches
on Barbie’s blazer, her handmade two-toned jeans.

*****

from As Bees

Oh, my brave friend, I can’t stop thinking
of that basement nightclub we found in Prague,
the year we circled Europe on the train. I wish
we could never stop our dancing, or disembark.
In your final week, I held you as a midwife does,
supporting your labor toward the next realm.
Talking to you now is like the language of bees:
A humming I do. The humming back you do.

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 SLIP

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

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

February 2026
112 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9"
$18
ISBN 978-1-960327-17-8
Emerging Voices