Keeping Room

Keeping Room is an intimate collection grounded in familial spaces of home and garden. The poems grapple with the nature of survival, and the survival of nature, as experienced by a woman living with chronic illness in an overdeveloped city with a shrinking natural footprint. The collection spools from the pain of chronic illness and grief, to the loss of political freedoms, to the disrupted urban (and global) landscape. However, despite despair and uncertainty, the poems reach for hope, love, and strength in the unlikely places where they may be found, with a steady turn toward nature and healing, or often, healing through nature, throughout the collection.

Ann E. Wallace’s third collection, Keeping Room pulls together several threads of her work--including her 2024 collection Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID's Long Haul (Kelsay Books), her work as a Long COVID patient and illness advocate, as well as her podcast The WildStory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants for the Native Plant Society of New Jersey.