Pelican’s Daughter is an intimate, attentive, and coasting exploration of loss in many iterations – of parents, of selves, of obligation and posturing. In Stockton’s deft and wondering hands, these poems have hollow-bones: the space for breath and questions to sing through, the structure capable and necessary to allow grief a graceful flight.
Arriving Spring 2026
The Scarecrow of My Former Self is a reclamation of visibility not just for Stockton’s speaker, but for all who have a chronic illness. These poems create a metaphorical scarecrow, a kind of spiritual scaffold on which to hang some hope.
Stockton’s Castaway, a meditative collection of epistolaries, syllogisms, and spells, calls back to the child self, a sailor’s daughter, and forward/inward to the adult self, a lover and friend. Alive to the sensory pleasures and pains of the world, in these poems we find a “goddess cavorting in her sea-spursed den,” “sorrow slips past the fact-checkers,” and “the heart is/ the center of the trunk of a tree.
–Maya Jewell Zeller, author and poet