Pin Bones

What does it mean to care for something you cannot save?

In the wake of personal loss and disrupted dreams, and amid the global uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, a poet arrives at a small land-based fish farm. There, she learns to do everything: spawning fish, picking eggs, feeding and tending fry, alevins, finger-length trout, Arctic char, and full-grown fish; cleaning tanks and raceways; harvesting what she has helped raise.

As the seasons turn, the farm reshapes the poet’s sense of time. Life and death are no longer abstract concepts but daily companions—counted, measured, held, and released. Through sustained attention to the rhythms of animal husbandry, Pin Bones explores care as both devotion and limitation.

Written in grounded language, these poems move in quiet conversation with the visions of the English mystic Julian of Norwich, circling a central, urgent question: Would you still love the world, knowing you could not protect it? Layered imagery accumulates across the collection, offering new ways of seeing what we nurture, what we destroy, and what we are called to love anyway. Pin Bones will resonate with readers of nature poetry, mystic writing, and those engaged with conservation, farming, and the ethics of care.