Description
Dressing in the Dark is the fourth poetry collection by award-winning poet and former Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken. In this powerful new work, Flenniken confronts the moral and emotional complexities of recovery, drawing from the speaker’s journey through breast cancer. Guided by memories of her mother and her intertwined identities as a mother, daughter, and writer, she navigates the terrain of illness, surgery, and healing. These poems become greater meditations on fear and mortality, touching on the quiet struggle to find acceptance amid grief.
About the author:
Seattle resident Kathleen Flenniken’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, Image, Plume, and many other journals, and in anthologies including Cascadia Field Guide, and Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World. She is the author of three poetry collections: Famous, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and named a Notable Book by the American Library Association, Plume, a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Williams Award and a Washington State Book Award winner, and Post Romantic, a Washington State Book Award finalist. She served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012–2014.
$24.95 / 978-0-89924-204-0 / Hdb. / 76 pages (November 2025)
$16.95 / 978-0-89924-208-8 / Pbk. / 76 pages
