A gripping and explosive debut book of poetry about navigating the pitfalls of modern motherhood.
These Chasms in the Earth is Cecily Stone’s story of holding her children as their world falls apart. For many women, the nuclear family becomes radioactive, unstable, and steeped in a slow poison. Stone faces impossible decisions as she cares for her husband’s aging grandparents while managing her own coercive and abusive marriage. Stone’s struggle is amplified when, in grandmother Eleanor’s later years, the once-sweet matriarch looks back on her life and realizes she has given the years away. From this realization, madness and rage erupt, and both women fall to the bottom of a chasm that seems to split in the middle of their family living room. Secrets are unearthed, a legal battle begins, and among all of it no one quite knows what to tell the children.
Through poems that are both darkly beautiful and somehow intimately familiar, Cecily Stone reveals truths often left in the shadows as she faces an uphill climb to break family cycles. If sacrifice should not define a mother – how should she become herself instead? How does she find redemption for the self she has lost? Stone maps her own cataclysmic eruption and powerful rebirth in these stunning and lyrical pages that leave a lasting mark.
So together, when the moon is burning
new in the spilled ink sky,
we write our secrets on scraps
and throw them in the pit,
by the ash, the chicken bones,
the melted motherboard,
and the longing for leaving–
you and I are the woman
we have become. We douse
our shame in gasoline,
spit out spark,
and wield these flickering lights
to write.
Praise for These Chasms in the Earth
Cecily Stone is “still erupting” in this vivid and visceral collection, leaving pieces of herself to devour along the way. These Chasms in the Earth provides no escape clause, and grips from the very beginning and does not let go. In these pages, Stone explores the intricacies of motherhood, the scars a family can inflict through generations, and the power in “wielding the flickering lights to write” something gorgeous, strong, and true. This collection is a roar, a spike of cayenne, and a dare to jump into a chasm to find out you have the beefiest goddamn biceps with the power to re-define and create a life worth loving and passing down.
-Tyler Hurula, author ofToo Pretty for Plain Coffee
“Like a collage or a shattered mirror, Cecily Stone’s debut book, These Chasms in the Earth, reveals a narrative in pieces. Each piece tantalizes—little glimpses of wisdom, humor, and truth to keep the reader wondering, turning pages. Stone sings of resilience, struggle, horror, betrayal, love and new beginnings. She reminds us that to be open to life means “swallowing the sky,” taking in its entirety, unfiltered.
— Jessica Gnoza, Author of Little Box of Light
These Chasms in the Earth is lyrical and heady collection surging with truth and brawn that sheds light on the reality so many women live through when trying to find their way out of the shadows of abuse. It is a masterful weaving of the stories of two women who have fallen into their own chasms. Beautiful and haunting poetry revolving around Stone’s fraught early years of motherhood and gripping essays about Eleanor–the grandmother who decided to build her home in the deepest part of the chasm. Readers fall with Stone down the side of the cliff with intense and raw imagery-drenched poems, then claw through the darkest mud–sticky line after sticky line filling the pages. Readers see the dirt under Stone’s fingernails as she strives to climb out, to free herself and her daughters. Finally, you wipe the tears of joy off your face, catching your breath again as you are led up and out with encouragement seeping through each line, like a sunrise after a long night. These Chasms in the Earth is a journey that balances horror and elegance, fear and bravery, injustice and the fight for what’s right. Ultimately, Stone shows readers how a woman can fall into the hardest depths but truly pick herself back up and want to help others, who have also fallen, find their strength to heal.
-Marissa Forbes, author of Surviving Peter Pan and Brief & Bleeding Margins
“These Chasms in the Earth explores myth and dispels commonly-accepted ideology about the purity and passage of motherhood. Cecily Stone speaks truth to expectation about becoming. The writing is unfiltered. There is anger, humor, sadness, loss, a fight for dignity, and also joy. Cecily’s collection is important to any woman who is ready to explore the authenticity of a woman’s journey toward herself. “
— Peg Codding, Author of Balance of Delicate Things
“Cecily has the ability to take you there. Her command of language and narrative complexity allows for an immersive experience into motherhood and how to fight back with all the art in your body.”
— Marie Timbreza, MAT, Author of Sustenance: 50 Poems + One Love Story