Available now through Finishing Line Press, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.
Field Guide to Forgiveness
This new collection from Rebecca Watkins will compel you to examine your own past with compassion and clarity. These poems convey the courage needed to heal what is broken. With both grit and lyrical language, Watkins reminds us that sometimes the “ache toward forgiveness outweighs the deed.”
“These poems communicate a search for identity and safety and will resonate with anyone willing to undertake that search. If grace is a simple elegance, an act of goodwill or divine impulse, then these poems go in grace, ‘I’ll take that bitter meat from my chest/Feed the wolves this one last time.”
- Mary Lou Buschi, author of Paddock
.jpg)
Rebecca Watkins
POET, ESSAYIST, MEMOIRIST and AUTHOR
MEET THE AUTHOR
Rebecca Watkins is a writer based in the Hudson Valley of New York. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Field Guide to Forgiveness (Finishing Line Press September 2023) and the full-length poetry book Sometimes, in These Places (Unsolicited Press 2017). Her creative nonfiction has been shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Awards. She writes poetry, creative nonfiction, and memoir.
BOOKS + PUBLISHED WORK
PUBLISHED
Poems &
Essays
POEMS & ESSAYS
Find more of Rebecca’s individually published poems and essays here.
SOMETIMES IN THESE PLACES
In her first collection of poetry,Watkins offers a frank dialogue about loneliness, family, poverty, and reticent religion. With poems both deeply personal and wildly relatable, Watkins asks her readers to brave the perils of honesty with her as she explores dark concepts with sophistication and grace.
REVIEWS
“Reading Rebecca Watkins’ poems, I’m in the presence of a poet who has chosen to observe carefully, passionately, yet unsentimentally. Her craft for invoking the world for what it is, whether beautiful or merciless, is the gaze of someone compelled to tell the truth without forgetting to love what she witnesses.”
JUAN PABLO MOBILI
“Memories don’t come with instruction manuals, but if they did, you would want them to be written by a poet like Rebecca Watkins. Imperatives and interrogations intertwine in her book Sometimes in These Places, an exploration of memory landscapes and the vivid beauty and disorientation that comes from moving across them.”