Poplar

Katie Sheehan’s debut collection explores place and displacement as they emerge through the growth of love, the suddenness of loss, and the shifting shape of self into motherhood. The poems transit across North America and Ireland, beginning with “the dangerous thirty seconds / just after take off”, journeying over highway and sea, and finding through each passage that the end is never far from the beginning. From weather systems to the migration of birds, landscape is woven across the outer reaches of love, while grief runs its thread through every place. Poplar is a collection where lights blaze and darken, where edges blur and nothing stands still, where every movement asks, “How could you have known / it was for this that you had travelled?”