We Left a Window Open to the Sea
Ellen Elder (2026)
$20 softcover
ISBN 979-8-234-25801-4
Publication date December 1, 2026. Preorder today with free shipping!
WINNER OF THE FREDERICK SMOCK POERY PRIZE
Praise for When We Were Gun: A Narrative Poetry Cycle
Ellen Elder’s We Left a Window Open to the Sea is part elegy, part memorial, a means of processing the loss of her mother who died after a long struggle with cancer. In poem after poem, she resurrects her mother’s life with stunning images, from a state of being “shriveled as a ginger root” to serving as a vital force in her daughter’s life, in our lives, the particularity and consecration of memories becoming an antidote to grief and a vehicle to reassemble her own life. Memory in the mind to her is like the lake they visit in Ireland where “we dream drifting between its islands, / holding the hands of the boat.” In this charged collection, she draws on Louise Bogan’s admonition to remember in our “dark hours / That more things move / Than blood in the heart.” In commemorating her mother’s death, Ellen Elder makes the world come more alive for all of us.—Richard Taylor, Frederick Smock Poetry Prize judge and author of Snow Falling on Water: New and Selected Poems
This book is a collection of thresholds, where the boundaries between mother and daughter, painting and body, fairytale and memory begin to dissolve, and grief unfolds in the suspended space between departure and arrival. “I was mid-air when my mother died,” the speaker recalls, an image that captures the collection’s abiding condition: to live between worlds. Moving across Europe and America, English and German, childhood and adulthood, these poems discover that the deepest forms of inheritance are not fixed but carried—across oceans, generations, and language itself. “Only a boat understands / the memory of water,” Elder observes. So too do these poems ask what vessels—body, language, imagination, love—can carry the past when home itself has become a crossing. With startling visual imagination and emotional precision, We Left a Window Open to the Sea transforms the ordinary into the uncanny, revealing that belonging is not found in arrival but in the luminous, difficult work of carrying the crossing within us.
—Kimberly Grey, author of A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing
I was drawn into this collection immediately, captivated by its sense of journey—its movement across countries, generations of mothers and daughters, deep wonders and piercing realities. Ellen Elder’s voice in this book mirrors its title: open, elemental, luminous. We Left a Window Open to the Sea unfolds in arrestingly honest and beautiful ways.
—Chloe Honum, author of The Lantern Room
Ellen Elder has a gift for narrative poetry that’s both poignant and efficient, but also rangy in its journey from the mind. Her debut collection is a haunting work of storytelling—nonlinear, but grounded in images, so that the leaps across space and time seem psychologically given rather than poetically contrived. The past of Elder’s childhood is richly rendered here, but no less so the recent years of her own mothering, which include an abusive partner, the pandemic, two moves across the ocean, and still, the long grief of her mercurial mother’s early death, which returns throughout like a chilling wind off the sea. Elder’s poems, sometimes challenging but always gripping, open her life to us with honesty, and with the warmth and beauty that memory keeps alongside the awful unsayable.
—Libby Maxey, editor at Literary Mama and author of Indwelling
We Left a Window Open to the Sea is dedicated to a daughter but haunted by an unforgettable mother lost too soon. Ellen Elder’s poems try again and again and “fail unflappably” to understand the true extent of that loss and to make a life meaningful and “open to the sea” in its wake. Stylistically, these poems suggest poets such as Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, but there is nothing quite like them, whether they are shouting out to college friends, remembering pouring a partner’s expensive booze down the sink, a daughter’s toggling between German and English, or the spirit and wisdom of a mother who, dying right before the trial of O. J. Simpson, notes that “men get away with things.”
—Keith Tuma, author of Studies in the Unnatural World
—Chloe Honum, author of The Lantern Room
Ellen Elder has a gift for narrative poetry that’s both poignant and efficient, but also rangy in its journey from the mind. Her debut collection is a haunting work of storytelling—nonlinear, but grounded in images, so that the leaps across space and time seem psychologically given rather than poetically contrived. The past of Elder’s childhood is richly rendered here, but no less so the recent years of her own mothering, which include an abusive partner, the pandemic, two moves across the ocean, and still, the long grief of her mercurial mother’s early death, which returns throughout like a chilling wind off the sea. Elder’s poems, sometimes challenging but always gripping, open her life to us with honesty, and with the warmth and beauty that memory keeps alongside the awful unsayable.
—Libby Maxey, editor at Literary Mama and author of Indwelling
We Left a Window Open to the Sea is dedicated to a daughter but haunted by an unforgettable mother lost too soon. Ellen Elder’s poems try again and again and “fail unflappably” to understand the true extent of that loss and to make a life meaningful and “open to the sea” in its wake. Stylistically, these poems suggest poets such as Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, but there is nothing quite like them, whether they are shouting out to college friends, remembering pouring a partner’s expensive booze down the sink, a daughter’s toggling between German and English, or the spirit and wisdom of a mother who, dying right before the trial of O. J. Simpson, notes that “men get away with things.”
—Keith Tuma, author of Studies in the Unnatural World
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ellen Elder was born in New York City, raised in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio, and earned degrees from The University of Chicago, Miami University of Ohio and The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She spent childhood summers in Ireland where her family ran an inn. Her poems and reviews have appeared in About Place Journal, Banshee Lit, Poetry, Tampa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is former co-poetry editor at Literary Mama. She writes about motherhood, grief, and how exile, loss, and nostalgia inform transnational experience and expression. She taught at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and lived for nine years in Germany before relocating to Charleston, South Carolina, where she lives with her daughter.
Ellen Elder, Photo by Lesya Malskaya
