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  • Published: 29 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9781405975261
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $26.99
Categories:

What the Deep Water Knows





From the author of Women's Prize 2022 longlisted novel THE PAPER PALACE comes a beautiful work of poetry looking sequentially at childhood, motherhood, marriage, divorce and mortality.

WHAT THE DEEP WATER KNOWS is the debut poetry collection from bestselling author Miranda Cowley Heller, a series of exquisite reflections on love in all its seasons.

In poetry that is quick-witted and lyrical, gentle and devastatingly frank, Cowley Heller contemplates time, marriage, and motherhood, and paints a moving portrait of a rich life.

  • Published: 29 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9781405975261
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $26.99
Categories:

About the author

Miranda Cowley Heller

Miranda Cowley Heller was raised in New York. After graduating from Harvard she became a books editor, before working for a decade as Head of Drama Series at HBO. She divides her time between Los Angeles, London and Cape Cod. The Paper Palace is her first novel.

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Praise for What the Deep Water Knows

A breathtaking collection… These poems map a woman’s life with extraordinary precision and skill. Heartbreaking, funny, poignant, hopeful – this is poetry that you didn’t know you needed but will change the way you see the world

Daisy Goodwin

How I loved this. A collection of poems that manages to capture a woman’s life in its entirety with all its joy, mystery and harsh unexpected endings. What the Deep Waters Know broke my heart and healed it too. Fans of The Paper Palace will adore it.

Clare Leslie Hall

Miranda’s poems are living breathing words that are raw, honest and thought provoking. Reading this collection felt like a key turning a tiny hidden lock within. Her poems are brilliant and intentional, you will no doubt come back to these pages time and time again

Jessica Urlichs, The Sunday Times bestselling author of Beautiful Chaos

What the Deep Water Knows takes you on a shiningly intimate journey - you are reader and confidant and you only get to glimpse at what lies below the surface. The chaotic narrative of life and loss re-organized to a waltzing beat of poetry. Silken and barbed all at once

Yael van der Wouden, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of THE SAFEKEEP

It's a rare poet who is able to be open, arresting, and get to the very inner heart of the individual - because it takes serious bravery. I loved it.

Melissa Lee-Houghton

Raw and intimate, the poems of What the Deep Water Knows are full of female life - a note scribbled to a son, a hummingbird in the garden, a lover walking away. Surprising and captivating

Jenny Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Pineapple Street

A life told in astonishing, unerring verses. The early poems are beautifully opaque, stones glimpsed in cloudy water. Lyrical, brutal, devastating, visionary—through verse a woman’s life emerges, gathers itself, is dismantled, and settles again. These stories are as precise and arresting as icy water

Sonya Walger, author of Lion
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