Poetry. Paper, Perfect Bound. 88 pages
2025, ISBN: 978-1-952781-24-7 $21.95
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Poetry gathers our lives, containing everything we hold inside. If poetry is a container, a place to gather what keeps us alive, what feeds our joy, and eases our sorrow, it is a communal basket, and it is often held by women. Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them is a collection of poems exploring what women hold, what they keep, and how they let go— of sorrow, loss and grief. Using the natural world as buffer, Ellen Stone writes poems exploring motherhood and mental illness, sexual assault, marriage and parenthood—as well as how loss filters down through family generations. The poems investigate daughters leaving home while trying to carry home within them. The moon is the mother in the book, waxing and waning, but always there, always coming back around.
Praise for Ellen’s work:
Ellen Stone possesses the enviable abilities to track the shifting intimacies between mothers and daughters and to summon forth startling imagery to describe the world. In her poems, mothering is attentiveness to others, to the self, and to change. Her poems are grounded in the mountains or the savannah; trees and animals co-exist with grief and grace. Her language—supple, radiant—reminds us love is never static; it redeems, it falters, it soars. I deeply admire the heart and the craft of these poems. – Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
This luminous collection moves like the cycles of the moon itself, waxing and waning on both love and loss, celebrating each bright fullness and new beginning, even those that arrive in darkness. Rich with poems from every register, Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them follows the course of a daughter who becomes a mother and then a daughter again, each experience revolving into the next in an almost lunar evolution. Though celestial in its guiding metaphor, this book stakes its claim on the earth as well and names its wonders gloriously: the changing seasons, the flora and fauna, the hills and towns and fields. Detail is a form of devotion, and these poems are reverent of the world around us, opening our eyes and hearts. Ellen Stone is a magnificent poet, a poet of landscapes, of plants and vegetation, of rocks and jelly jars, wolves and Ferris wheels, of family, girlhood, and womanhood. Look to this new collection as you do the sky at night, searching for stars, and you will be rewarded with brilliant new constellations made from surprising language, rich imagery, and luxurious sound. You, like everybody, will want to keep these poems inside you and beside you for a long time to come. – Amanda Moore, author of Requeening
Ellen Stone’s poems are full of dappled light, piercing and sharp among the shadows of the ordinary. Here is the lost mother held in moon sadness, the daughter enacting her troubled loyalty, and farmhouse rooms built of hard-won understanding. Here, woven into the cotton and wool of family is deeply earth-bound love. Stone’s voice offers us poems of delicate nuance, fulfilling metaphor, and rich affections luminous in their truth-telling. These are poems that will stay with you and hold you in their reverence. – Anne-Marie Oomen, author of As Long as I Know You: The Mom Book
Ellen Stone’s collection of poetry is a layer cake of rich descriptions alternated with surprise. She writes of mothers in profound ways, as in the line “she rose between the geese and the geraniums, /a small knife in her grasp to peel potatoes—/ holding the key to our front door that never had a lock.” This collection about women’s experiences has many doors to enter. The evocative poems are hinges inward and out. This book is an amazing experience of poetry. – Denise Low, author of House of Grace, House of Blood
Instructions on leaving {mother}
In order to leave her, you must find her
outside the kitchen window, pale, waning
where just days ago, she was here,
a perpetual streetlight beaming in,
crown of hickory and oak framing her.
Now she has bled again into daylight
dissolved into the gypsum bowl above—
translucent, thin enough to puncture
everything you thought you knew
about fixtures, solidity, timepieces.
Here you thought she was a wristwatch
you could plan a day around, regular
as an almanac, even with her phases.
Now, mother as floater moon, alabaster
searchlight over the tree line, suspended.
Soon the sun denudes the sky, obscures her.
But she has seeped outside now, oxygen.
About the Author
Ellen Stone was born in Syracuse, NY, and grew up on Spring Hill in Pennsylvania’s Appalachian Mountains above the north branch of the Susquehanna River. She received a B.A. from Antioch College and an M.S. from Kansas State University.
Ellen lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she raised three daughters with her husband, Roger Lauer. She taught special education in Ann Arbor Public Schools from kindergarten to high school from 1986 until she retired in 2018. Ellen continues to advise a poetry club at Community High School where she taught for over 20 years. She is a co-host for a poetry monthly series, Skazat! and a co-editor for the literary journal, Public School Poetry.
Ellen’s collection, What Is in the Blood was published by Mayapple Press in 2020. Her chapbook, The Solid Living World won the 2013 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press Chapbook Contest. Ellen’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Third Coast, Passages North, Michigan Quarterly Review Mixtape, Sweet Lit, The Museum of Americana, Great Lakes Review, and Dunes Review, among other places. Her poetry has been nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Ellen was a 2024 Good Hart Artist-in-Residence.
Reach Ellen at www.ellenstone.org.
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