The Cardinals

Award-winning songwriter Amy Speace’s debut collection of poetry, The Cardinals, is a lyrical investigation of marriage, divorce, mothering, and mysticism told through poems that read like intimate conversations but evoke the complexities of love and loss through the natural world. Speace tackles the internal language of coming together and splitting apart, evoking rivers and birds, the South and the North, weather and racism and family history and it all comes together like birdsong.

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Advanced Praise

“After the pain and stress of loss, the end of a love, what does one do, or how can one be? Patience, focus, the heart work of redemption, the rekindling of love as love changes: These themes move with grace and clarity through poem after poem. It’s almost like reading a novel in verse the way Amy Speace, with her keen awareness of the power of song, links the narrative and the lyric moments as she reimagines heartbreak and loneliness as well as the sweet and tender parts of being a single mother in a chaotic world. The Cardinals is a fine and moving book of poems.”

—Greg Pape, author of A Field of First Things

“Amy Speace is an accomplished singer-songwriter, so she knows how to tell a story, how to make the listener care, and how to create something beautiful and meaningful that will live inside a person for years to come. She’s done that with The Cardinals, a collection of poems that grapples with memory, motherhood, place, family, and loss—in other words, the business of being human. Her voice is one I’m grateful to have in the world.”

—Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod

“This is Amy Speace’s first collection of poetry, but she is, perhaps unsurprisingly for such an accomplished songwriter, already a poet of great perceptiveness and skill. If you love poems that are utterly clear and also strange, personal and intimate without the slightest hint of self-absorption, and above all permeated by an unobtrusive yet undeniable music, this is the book for you.”

—Matthew Zapruder, I Love Hearing Your Dreams and Story of a Poem