My husband died unexpectedly in November last year. I wanted to honor him with a collection of poems, so I collected many of the poems I’d written previously about him and set about writing some new ones to create a chapbook. But after that, I found that even when my poems seemed to be about a totally different topic, his death kept sneaking into them.

Judy Kaber’s poems have appeared in journals such as Rattle, Pleiades, Poet Lore, and Prairie Schooner. She won the 2023 Maine Poetry Contest, the 2024 Maine Literary Short Works Poetry Award, and the 2024 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest. She is a past poet laureate of Belfast, Maine (2021-2023).