Everyday Kintsugi

Coming February 2nd, 2027 - Books will ship the final week of January
Preorder now!

Everyday Kintsugi explores what it means to be broken and piece life together again in a way that shines with strength and beauty. While detailing the struggles of dealing with mental health, infertility, miscarriages, and motherhood, the poems in this debut collection provide a glimpse into the interior world of one who has suffered a great loss, and offer quiet ways of connecting to the strength and healing of nature. With a tender heart, unflinching gaze, and precise language, this book of poems examines the beauty and pain in life and provides a companion for anyone with compassion for the plight of others.  

Alison Lake has lived in Michigan her whole life, never more than a mile from water. She lives with her husband, only living child, and the ghost of her black cat. She earned an MFA in poetry from Western Michigan University and has written poetry since she was introduced to it in fifth grade.

from Knowing This

So this is love, not frenzy
Exactly, but a kind of
Buzzing in the wires or
A pair of fingers climbing softly
From the nape of the neck into the brain stem.
Not deep heat and wet breath
Pressed close to the ear
But two pairs of boots
Set side by side in the hallway, the top of one pair
Leaning gently on the other, kept straight by it
As if to keep it from falling

Drills

I picked you up from kindergarten
and asked, “What did you do?”
I was expecting “Nothing.”
Instead, you told me about drills.
You said the fire drill was loud,
but you got to go outside.
The tornado, or tomato, as you called it
meant everyone lining the halls.
And then you talked all nonchalant
of the stranger drill.
“It’s like hide-and-seek,” you said,
“But you really don’t want to be found.”
It was then I realized
it was an active shooter drill.
I felt my heart flutter and tear
like an autumn leaf all gone to ground,
the veins just holding the membrane
of the leaf together.
You asked me why I was crying,
and I could answer only, “I love you.”

Alison Lake’s poems reflect the tenderness and pain of the natural world, as experienced through the eyes of a mother. She simultaneously celebrates the efficiency of bacteria and vultures who help compost dead things so the earth might breathe, while mourning the unnecessary destruction wrought by human greed and machine culture. Here is an eco-poetics that speaks to the world in clear accessible language and imagery.

—Alison Luterman, author of Hard Listening


These are powerful, tender, unflinching poems, in which Alison Lake renders the sacred labor of healing, mothering, and making a home for oneself in the world with steady attention, careful observation, and an open heart. 

—Holly Wren Spaulding, author of Familiars and founder of Poetry Forge


The poems in Alison Lake’s Everyday Kintsugi come to us as sprinkles of powdered gold, filling in the cracks of past wounds, the suffering of ancestors, the pain of wars across the world. Lake fearlessly proclaims: “I will walk in that darkness, in shadow / and I will spy the beauty / in the muffled edges.” A deep care for all living beings weaves through these reverent poems—for the road-struck raccoon, a purple finch carried to class, and her own daughter emerging after a dangerous and difficult birth. This necessary collection invites us to honor and bless the darkness that eventually turns “into rich loam,” out of which blooms “the new blossom,” offering us a deeper, truer kind of beauty.

—James Crews, author of Turning Toward Grief and Breathing Room

February 2027
100 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9
$20
ISBN 978-1-960327-26-0
Emerging Voices in Poetry