Publication Date: May 29, 2025
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.
Poetry, like art, speaks to each of us differently. We go in search of looking, for a connection, for inspiration, and today, maybe for an explanation or an answer. But somehow, what we find is not what we expected.
Miranda Cowley Heller has written rich soil to uncover words and phrases that will surely meet some expectations of searching. What the Deep Water Knows is this accomplished writer’s first published collection of poetry. Her name may strike some familiarity from her bestselling novel, The Paper Palace, or even in the credits of some blockbuster HBO shows.
Cowley Heller here creates a loosely painted sequence of growing up and growing into a woman. The description is intricate with sights, sounds, tastes, and unexpected comparisons. She looks in on her surroundings and those who occupy the spaces, sometimes with amazement and at other times with rank bitterness.
Miranda Cowley Heller’s poetry in What the Deep Water Knows narrates an ordinary life punctuated with longing, abuse, and wonder. Read along through vignettes that are ripe with wording that will linger.
Every woman can find recognition of some aspect of her life, of her survival in female existence, within Miranda Cowley Heller’s personal, poetic collection, What the Deep Water Knows. 
Miranda Cowley Heller was raised in New York City and Cape Cod. Her debut novel The Paper Palace was a number one New York Times bestseller in the US, a Sunday Times bestseller in the UK, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize. She has worked as senior vice president and head of drama series at HBO, developing and overseeing such shows as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, and Big Love, among others. This is her first collection of poetry.
