In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything...

"A ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things--seen and unseen. A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all... With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay...

"What are two parents to do when their beloved little dragon keeps breathing fire all over the house?"--

Feeling a stronger connection with the dying than to the living, Clover, a death doula in NYC, has no life of her own until the final wishes of a feisty old woman sends her across the country to uncover a forgotten love story--and perhaps, her own happy ending.

As they dance, wiggle, and boogie together, fathers assure their sons that they can become anything they want and that they will always have their fathers' support.

Within these worlds, we travel outward and inward, straddling our lives' oppositions: parental/relationship struggle and loss, home and away, isolation and reconnection, the spiritual/mystical realm and physicality-always balancing grief and reemergence, hello and goodbye. Valediction, with poems, diptychs, and micro essays, brings those oppositions into focus and reconciliation and grounds her in the earth under her feet, especially in her gardening...

"Darby, Mary Beth, and Rhea are on personal quests to reclaim aspects of their identities subsumed by motherhood--their careers, their sex lives, their bodies. Their children, though, disrupt their plans when an unsettling medical condition begins to go around the Little Academy preschool: the kids are craving blood. Then a young teacher is found dead, and the only potential witnesses are ten adorable four-year-olds. Soon it becomes clear that the...