Wise and engaging chapbook on parenthood, faith, and love.

Great for fans of Rudy Francisco’s I’ll Fly Away, Morgan Harper Nichols’s All Along You Were Blooming.

HEALTH, HOME, GARDENING Half Moon Waking: Rising, Falling, and Walking Through Marriage, Motherhood, and Miscarriage Liv Hunziker 180p, trade paper, $15.99, ISBN 979-8-218-29618-6

“Motherhood,” Hunziker writes, “Tougher than any marathon.” In this lyrically penned collection of poetry, essays, and short fictions, Hunziker highlights the joys and challenges of motherhood and marriage, plus the grief of miscarriage, and “scratching the surface” of the truth about life, faith, and love. Featuring different forms of poetry such as haikus, tankas, haibuns, and villanelles, Half Moon Waking is a candid exploration into the battle of being “caught between thriving and crashing” when it comes to the exhaustive yet rewarding “calling” of being a parent.

Shining with insight and playful language, pieces such as “Calling Mommy” (“three-dimensional sound wrapping/ around a sweet spot/ the word naively singing a miniature siren sword”) dig deep into life’s richest experiences. Hunziker also offers vivid detail in pieces exploring the challenges of breastfeeding and considering the calming tranquility of nature (“Trees teach. Trees produce. Trees help build things. Yet maybe even more profoundly, they are simply here.”), the lines fluid and alive with feeling while honoring the poetic forms. “The canvas of life provides so many unique motivations for our work,” Hunziker writes about finding a passion or calling and “not ‘only’ trying to arrange our bliss.” This inspirational collection also focuses on faith, love, and cultivating a relationship with God, children, and ourselves.

Half Moon Waking explores life lessons with vulnerability and empathy as Hunziker, writing with approachable eloquence, ruminates on experiences both treasured and painful, including some, like the exhaustion of the first weeks of motherhood, that are too complex—”too ripe and absurd,/ too stark real”—to fully capture in language. The result is a surprising collection, straightforward and personal despite its host of formal approaches, digging deeply into what the author has learned as she has grown, often in the face of self-doubt, into maturity and the wisdom that “the most beautiful treasures in life are those that involve pain, time, and great effort.”

Cover: A- | Design & typography: A | Illustrations: – Editing: A | Marketing copy: A