The book I never wanted to write

Sleepwalker:

I’m proud to announce publication of my fifth poetry chapbook, Sleepwalker. This collection contains the poems I never wanted to write, the ones I fought against writing for years.

These poems speak to the painful healing after my eldest son’s suicide. They unearth the heartbreak of motherhood and deep loss. They embrace who my son was and what he will never be.  

It took me nearly ten years to start writing some of these poems.

Why did I write them?

People ask me if writing about my son, his death in 2011, and the grieving process was cathartic or healing.

At first, no, it was not. The pain overwhelmed me. I avoided exploring it. Apparently the muse had a different plan.

In 2019, I attended a performance with friends to see Jaap ter Linden, a celebrated Dutch cellist. One of his songs, Solo Suite, was beautiful, haunting and so sad. For whatever reason, the melody took me back to the moment when my husband and I found Derek, deceased, in his apartment (we had driven from Michigan to Ohio to take him to a hospital because we knew he was risk). Listening to the cellist while holding back tears, the start of a poem came to me. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to my friends that evening, but I was shook.

When I returned home, I felt compelled to write. Then it took me months to look at the draft and begin editing. I cried every time I did.

I continued to write after that, taking mental health breaks when needed. Each time it got a little bit easier. When I wrote a poem about him as a boy, how he raided my costume jewelry to dress up as Mr. T, for example, the chapbook became a way of honoring him and his life.  

Finishing Line

The chapbook is published by Finishing Line Press, a traditional publisher based in Kentucky.

A few of the poems were published in earlier chapbooks or anthologies, but they fit the narrative of this collection, so I included them. The collection explores loss and grief, and how your daily life changes after tragedy. I hope that readers who have suffered such a loss will know they are not alone. You don’t ever “recover” from some losses; you learn to live with them.

Buy a signed copy from me.

Sleepwalker is available from the press in paperback and hardcover. It is also listed on Amazon.

Solo Suite

Finalist for the 2022 Julia Darling Poetry Prize

Linden’s cello sighs
with each bow stroke
across the gut strings,
Solo Suite Number Three
in C major.
His head drops,
his eyes close,
his hand dances.
The cello weeps,
sighs, trills
and moans.
I hear you
in the sad
unhurried
depths.

Transported
from the audience
to sudden witness
in another time,
I see your hand
suspended
in the air
above your chest,
fingers frozen,
eyes closed,
your throat
tightly wrapped,
imagine your
last breath
in the final sigh
before you asked
death to take you.
I wanted to
push your arm
down, beg
please, tell me, son,
what I see
isn’t so,
what I hear
isn’t
my own weeping.

About Sleepwalker

Sleepwalker is a moving poetic tribute to Linda Sienkiewicz’s late son, Derek. Resolute, lyrical, and unflinching, these poems are informed by profound loss even as they pulse with a mother’s capacious love. A brilliant and devastating account of parenthood as the junction where both our greatest gifts and our greatest fears sometimes converge.

—Kelly Fordon, author of I Have the Answer and Garden for the Blind (Wayne State University Press) and Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press)

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Only a poet as brave as Linda Sienkiewicz can invert grief’s long shadow into a beam that shines between worlds, illuminating the faces and voices of the lost. Reading her Sleepwalker, we’re nudged awake from the dream and reminded: hold close those you love, cherish the life you’re in. By their light, these poems salvage and reclaim the heart and its losses. And for that—for the work of this brave poet—I’m grateful.

—Robert Fanning, author of Severance, Our Sudden Museum, American Prophet, and The Seed Thieves

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In Sleepwalker, Linda Sienkiewicz writes with tenderness, clarity, and breathtaking vulnerability about her eldest son, who took his own life.  In beautiful, intensely felt poems, she captures her spiraling thoughts,  anger, and  waves of grief.  Throughout the book, her desire for connection endures:  in one poem, she hears her son in a cello’s “sad unhurried depths;” in another, her son reappears in her kitchen ten years later, ready to listen to everything she never said to him.  I admire these poems deeply.  I wish they did not have to be written.

—Kathleen McGookey, author of Instructions for My Imposter

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Please order from Finishing Line Press, or use this printable order form.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your support. Much love to you.

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Thank you for visiting!

Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a writer, poet, and artist.
Learn more about her multi-award winning novel, In the Context of Love.
Learn more about her picture book, Gordy and the Ghost Crab.
Learn more about her poetry chapbook, Sleepwalker

Visit LinkTree for all Linda’s social media links.