Beneath a Strawberry Night Sky (Raven & Wren Press, 2023) is Robin Michel’s debut full-length poetry collection, chronicling the second half of a marriage, the separation, and the divorce. It is a marvel to witness exploration of pain and join as a marriage ends and the impacts on each member of the family. Michel has said that she wrote the collection to honor what she and her first husband had, grieve its loss, and find forgiveness.

Many readers, with or without the experience of divorce, will find a place for themselves in her skillful poetry as she navigates:

how I walk
down this path between
what I possess and what I desire

By joining Michel in exploring this earlier life, I found my own memories more brightly illuminated. When the mother in the poem “At a Rest Stop Between Butte and Missoula” addresses her son in a poem while imagining giving birth to him at this rest stop or by crawling

…deep—
deeper than your flesh
was then lodged within my body—
like an animal crawling deep into your beloved woods

I am there with her. In that bright light, I reach my own greater understanding.

I also felt the coldness in my own bones as a marriage turns indifferent and then ends, but also delight in how the mother’s love for her children pulls her out of despair. A young daughter wanders at 2 AM an overpass alone as her mother searches for her:

She does not notice her mother’s car
slowing down, the beauty pulsing…
…the celestial pinpricks
of light shining from above

Flowing through this collection are intriguing images of love, friendship, and gratitude like the sweetness of fresh fruit, with the poet returning to the grounding process of poetry and writing: Write it out. Begin again.