The Daughter's Almanac

“With unflinching stanzas threaded through with grief’s relentless lyric, The Daughter’s Almanac is a masterwork, a deftly crafted illustration of the myriad ways beauty collides with pain. Succinct and utterly memorable, these poems take hold of the heart and tug it toward an insistent light. We are washed alive in that light. We are changed by it.”—Patricia Smith, 2014 Backwaters Prize Judge
 
“In The Daughter’s Almanac, Katharine Whitcomb meditates on the nature of solitude while showing us the consolation of a life of the mind, a life lived in art. The book begins with the death of the poet’s mother, and we progress through grief, toward life, toward love, toward a world rebuilt word by word and fashioned into poems that radiate from a mind full of such humanity, such thoughtfulness and empathy that I am in awe. This book reminds us why poetry remains alive and how the power of a radiant imagination can make us whole again.”—Mark Wunderlich
 
“Katharine Whitcomb’s poems in The Daughter’s Almanac braid the inner and outer seasons. Elegiac, meditative, and lyrical, and with elegant formal variety, she writes at the liminal edge between presence and absence. With a keen, observant power, where ‘a slice of time’ is ‘vibrating and open-ended,’ she writes a poetry of acuity and grace.”—Arthur Sze