The Unknown Daughter by Tricia Knoll

(1 customer review)

$17.99

 

Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter dedicates itself to the incredible work of Making Known: of naming and describing the complex experience of being a daughter, of asking who we might be as a culture and a country if we took it upon ourselves to honestly do so.  Knoll’s book is a beautiful, taut series of linked poems filled with myriad voices, each a pebble dropped into the silencing waters of family and history, each helping to recover not just one daughter, but all.

These wise and deft poems are conversation, chorus, and community all in one: they speak right to us; they invite us in. They give crucial instruction in Making Known: “sing when the first impulse may be to whisper.”

–Annie Lighthart, Author of Pax

 

Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter is an un-portrait, individual and collective, historical and visionary, composed by multiple voices constellated via the titular character. This poem sequence strikingly shapes absence from so many presences. It’s a timely reminder that the more things change—socially, culturally, politically—the more they stay the same, and “the unknown” must claim her own narrative.

–Marj Hahne, Writer, Teacher, MFA in Creative Writing

 

The Unknown Daughter is a worthy monument to a monument that ought to exist. This connected series of poems offers acknowledgement and tribute to those women who didn’t fit the pattern and made major contributions in science and art. In these vivid poems about the symbolic unknown woman, her family, the watchwomen at the memorial, and even an Uber driver (who says dismissively, “You won’t stay long./Tell me if you want me/to drive you somewhere else.”), Tricia Knoll makes her own important contribution.

–Penelope Scambly Schott, author of On Dufur Hill

 

 

 

 

 

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The Unknown Daughter

by Tricia Knoll

Paper

List: $17.99

979-8-88838-479-4

2024

Tricia Knoll’s parents were faith healers; she did not always heal the way they hoped. A sense of isolation and oddball-ness permeated her autobiographical narrative as described in her How I Learned To Be White. That book explores the impacts of ancestry, class and education on privilege and received the 2018 Human Relations Indie Book Gold Award for Motivational Poetry.

Knoll taught high school English for eight years until she realized that was not her calling. In those years she worked with many students who were unknowns to their families and sometimes even their friends. She realized other young women shared similar childhood experiences. Her Unknown Daughter poems – loosely connected narratives about being different than some expected norm – grow out of those experiences. None of these poems have been published before; they each rely on the others to clarify and expand on the principle of making known the accomplishments and histories of women.

Knoll’s poetry collections include love poems to trees (One Bent Twig) and for horses (Let’s Hear It for the Horses), stories of environmental and personal change over time in a small town on Oregon’s north coast (Ocean’s Laughter), narratives of how some relationships work or don’t work (Checkered Mates), and admiration for the people and creatures of a small organic family farm in Trout Lake, Washington (Broadfork Farm).

Herwork appears widely in journals, anthologies and these collections. Individual poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of Net. She is a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual which seeks to foster a community of poets.

She lives with two dogs in the woods of Vermont with plenty of seasons to study women that time ignored, to describe a childhood that was often lonely, and to support social justice work on behalf of those who need to be acknowledged and known.

Website: triciaknoll.com

 

 

1 review for The Unknown Daughter by Tricia Knoll

  1. Libby VanBuskirk –

    Tricia Knoll is a fine poet who comes up with unique ideas and images. I’m anxious to have her book to see her latest poems.

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