New Poetry Collection To the Press — Love Letters from Cuckold Creek

It’s ready for printing! I finished my final round of edits from proofs of my new poetry collection this week. Love Letters from Cuckold Creek (Cyberwit.net, 2025) evolved since initially compiled in 2024 — her name has changed, poems dropped and added, and the overall why shifted. Yet my original impetus strengthened as I drafted more pieces, periodically sending versions out to publishers. I’ll share a little bit about the themes in this collection, as well as what some generous others say about my work.

Actually, let me begin by sharing the blurbs from poets, who are both friends and inspirations, who have read Love Letters from Cuckold Creek. It just delights me too much! 

If we could take some syllables out of Love Letters from Cuckold Creek to inject into the algorithms now making A I, we would make its future language crystalline and kind.  It would provide the necessary gene now missing from robotics—a feminine intelligence, with a mother’s nurturing love; and the tenacity of a performer:  ( “…I now sing for myself…”) Kristin Kowalski Ferragut is also a musician, you can tell by her cadence, the lifted phrase, the lilt, and the esthetics using word and space skillfully placed. Just hear lines like: “I don’t want a day to dawn/ without you, so I stay/ awake.” This book is way overdue. I would have always wanted it.

Grace Cavalieri

Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate

The world needs a place like Cuckold Creek where one can immerse in Kristin Kowalski Ferragut’s poetry, keep it in our mind’s eye and remember it as we catch sight of a cloud “Take the sky from me for a moment, unwrap my arms from the clouds/As We Rely on Each Other” and smile thinking of her venture into the wetlands under the watch of her grown child “…in brackish water I scoop with palms, to sprinkle on the limbs and chest, a kind of baptism/Alive on Cuckold Creek II” and recall the odes she wrote to her children. Loss, love, mourning, and nature are themes Kristin addresses and forges into one’s mind. The world needs a copy of Cuckold Creek in their back pockets to give one “Sanctuary” with and through Kristin’s poetic language “Even after rainy nights, I awake to starlight/Stars Bend Light, Erase Habit of Devotion.”

kelly catharine bradley, author of a gift and love, loss and the enormity of it all

Reading Kristin Kowalski Ferragut’s latest collection, Love Letters from Cuckold Creek, is like savoring a long, unrushed conversation with a friend. Each poem is intimate and personal, and yet, they are universal in their explorations of our emotional lives and loves. A biosphere of bruises and beauty. The richness of her language and freshness of her metaphors draw us even further into her world. From the “shimmer of hummingbirds” to a “stained-glass heart,” she explores what it is to be human. At the heart of her work, we come to realize that her world is truly ours, too.

Le Hinton, author of Elegies for an Empire, Sing Silence, and The God of Our Dreams

Oh, my grin! On this hazy, rainy Saturday morning, I feel starlight. Lucinda Marshall, Luther Jett, and Alison Palmer’s blurbs grace the cover of my first poetry collection, Escape Velocity (Kelsay Books, 2021). I pulled out my beat up copy to indulge in reminiscing as I write this and wonder why doing so isn’t my #1 go to on bad days. I can’t imagine reading these without smiling.  

There is something precious in having the names of people I love and admire on a collection of my work. And honestly, I don’t care how busy I am, I’m always psyched when someone asks me to write a blurb for their work too. One of the three questions I asked the publisher before agreeing to go with Cyberwit was if the blurbs could be put on the back cover of the book. He agreed, then put my bio and pic on the back of the book. Oh no! There is something less than precious in looking at one’s own promo pic and bio. I find bios particularly not interesting, including, unfortunately, my own and am not sure how to fix that. It seems the resume-esque nature of a bio is hard to dress up, or dress down. The cover was fixed.

The text itself, the 44-poem collection, divided into five sections, took a few edits in formatting, particularly to honor white space on the page and fix indents and spacing. I’m thrilled with the result and am looking forward to having book in hand soon.

These poems were almost all written after Escape Velocity. On one level, it’s a snapshot of five years in a life. (It took about ten months from submission to publication of Escape Velocity and some poems in Love Letters from Cuckold Creek were written in that time.) There are some tender love poems in this collection. But for much of these years, I struggled to settle into unconvoluted singleness. Even when coupled, which I was aside from a few months here or there for 23 years, I was largely independent and received little support. But one can’t minimize the difference in perspective and emotional atmosphere between being in a couple — even if the connection is largely in the abstract, even if it’s detrimental  —  and being single without a romance to dream on. I’ve not stopped being a romantic, but have redefined what that means. I am more sensual, spiritual, and whole, or perhaps more accurately, I acknowledge with greater clarity who I’ve always been. 

As I begin Love Letters from Cuckold Creek, “If you search everywhere, yet cannot find what you are seeking, it is because what you seek is already in your possession.” ― Lao Tzu

I needed to finish the work reflected in this collection to realize that this was the capstone of this journey.

In addition to recovering from a difficult relationship, embracing solitude, and finding gratitude for all the grace I find in being single (I debated blogging about things I love about being single, particularly in light of British Vogue’s October article, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” Maybe another time. I find the musings amusing.), I reflect on loss, parenting, childhood, and my children. The loss poems reflect the times, people who have died, or otherwise left, and provided me a vehicle to process and celebrate in verse, as I do. To me, the parenting and children poems feel more timeless and essential.

During my stay at Porches Writing Retreat in June, I met two wonderful writers with whom I discussed poetry and writing about kids. They both resist writing about their children. I somewhat understand. There is a special reverence with which I approach drafting and editing poems inspired by my kids. And I always ask their permission before I share anything about them, which I don’t commonly do of others. I don’t know if those poems are as interesting to as many people as some of my poems on other themes may be, or if maybe their appreciative audience might be more narrow. But to me they are the most radical, central to my heart, poems I write.

Typically when I am asked, “What does that mean?” after reading a poem, I answer, “Exactly,” or sometimes, “What does it mean?” Here I’ve shared more interpretation than is common from me. I also believe that if you read something else in my work, it’s entirely valid. My poetry isn’t particularly literal and few pieces are autobiographical. Things often move around and only make sense intuitively.

I’ll share more when I receive the books, plan the launch party, and get readings scheduled. I think it’s wicked important that we celebrate wins where we find them — aced a class, dropped a new single, finished a painting, built a Lego set, designed a game, beat your personal best, completed a novel draft, published a poem, chapbook, collection, short story… Time to celebrate! So hope to raise a glass with you soon, figuratively or irl. 

And I’ll leave you with a poem from Love Letters from Cuckold Creek:

Stars Bend Light, Erase Habit of Devotion

An injurious name persists

calling out from innocent places.

  Whispered too long it turns stranglehold

to the future, forked in rocks and wings.

Deceit is impalpable, not 

impossible. It grows like weeds in collusion 

with desire and hope. A place of light may save

from harm, if it embodies enough facets.

Oh Stars, be my falling and catch me. 

Ante up erasures (unname, reframe), stash

memory away, until weak, collapsed, exploded

or cooled in any of your spaces.

-tuck behind backlit clouds 

-throw into Betelgeuse to burn 

-sink beneath swimming sparkles in dome-skied Tennessee

-cover in oil swirls of dots and pentagons that fuel wind and long-necks  

-bury past upward gaze from car hood in boosy Florida cemetery 

-drown below your reflection in the river

-fold into the silver side of a two-toned sequin shirt

A lie no longer the shortest distance between

two points; assent no longer my lingering folly.

We rewrite futures, the Stars and I, rehab

thoughts. Even after rainy nights, I awake to starlight.