From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Paper Palace, a Reese's Book Club Pick, comes a debut poetry collection that paints a moving portrait of a rich life from childhood to love to marriage to motherhood to divorce and beyond.



'Breathtaking . . . will change the way you see the world.' —Daisy Goodwin, author of The American Heiress



If I could fly backward, I would. To the safety of branches, to the time when my heart still raced for you, twelve hundred beats a minute.



In poetry that is at once bold and lyrical, affecting and devastatingly frank, Miranda Cowley Heller takes us through childhood, marriage, motherhood, and beyond. Suffused with the natural world and the landscape of Cape Cod, where many of the poems are set, What the Deep Water Knows contemplates love in all the seasons.