About Cecily:

Cecily Stone is a mother, writer, computer nerd, and author of These Chasms in the Earth.  Her works have appeared in Welcoming The Muse (Twenty Bellows), Poems in Praise of Libraries (World Stage Press), Gypsophila Literary Magazine, Retrograde Review, Canvas Creative Arts Magazine (Indiana University), and on a set of compost liners distributed by Compost Colorado.  Stone shares her stories of motherhood, sacrifice, and rebirth at open mics and on instagram: @cecilystonespeaks.  On the weekends, you can usually find her behind the mic, outdoors climbing rocks, or camping with her husband Michael and their large zoo of children and pets.

About These Chasms in the Earth: 

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.