To the University of Vermont, thank you for the grant to support this book, and for my inspiring English department colleagues and students. Dan Fogel, Major Jackson, Didi Jackson, Val Rohy, Huck Gutman, Greg Bottoms, Sarah Turner, Tony Magistrale, Chris Vaccaro, Philip Baruth, Holly Painter, David Huddle, Chloe Knapp, Margaret Edwards, and Angela Patten deserve special thanks.

Finally, thank you to my mother for your strength, generosity, and integrity—a daughter could not have a more powerful role model. Thank you to my brothers for your abiding support and for occasionally running the vacuum cleaner during my overbearing childhood performances. To everyone in the Parmelee clan and to my in-laws, you’ve taught me that caring for people means raising one another up, and I’m grateful.

To Bowie and Bruce, you are the light I wake for every morning. To Kyle, I don’t know where to begin except that test in Fred Chappell’s Modern Poetry class, where you answered the question wrong but you got a point for humor anyway. I loved you then, I love you now, and I’m still learning from you. Thank you for always believing in this work.

About the Author

© Karen Pike

MARIA HUMMEL is a novelist and poet. Her most recent novel, Still Lives, was a Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine pick, Book of the Month pick, and BBC Culture Best Book of 2018, and has been optioned for television and translated into multiple languages. She is also the author of the novel Motherland, a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year, and House and Fire, winner of the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize for Poetry. She has worked and taught at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Stanford University, and the University of Vermont. She lives in Vermont with her husband and sons.