Overview

What Life Is Like Here on Earth dashes between images of hope and joy like a pedestrian caught in a downpour without an umbrella; there's no denying the cold, pelting rain of personal and environmental loss, but even so, there are animals, kind strangers, and love. These poems let readers in on a Midwestern childhood with horses, a woman's life in two generations, the interior monologue of a middle-aged person with chronic illness. They're heartbroken, angry, self-deprecating. Magic peeks into the ordinary world from the distant past and the inevitable future. What happened and what's imagined exist side by side. What do you long for? What makes you suffer? What gives you solace? You know what it's like, this life here on earth.

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9781962405737

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Reviews

How can any of us hold trauma and remain open to love in a disappointing world? Poet Katie Riegel wrestles with this question in the clear-eyed poems that comprise her new collection, What Life Is Like Here on Earth. These stunning poems, which manage to be both brutally honest and heartfelt testimonies to the speaker's embodied and existential pain, orbit around loss--a mother, a sister, a rural childhood where beloved horses, dogs, and even raccoon kits provided sweetness and protection that feel elusive in the speaker's present-day universe. Animals--both domestic and wild--pervade this collection, offering a lens for understanding depression and despair, but also something more: in our caretaking of creatures, we find lifelines in the routines we count on for normalcy, as well as unexpected joy that can still surprise us into hope. --Sarah Carey, author of The Grief Committee Minutes and Bloodstream Katherine Riegel's What Life Is Like Here On Earth is an earnest, clear-sighted collection that squares the tension between the inevitability of despair and our desperation for joy, the speaker contending with inherited trauma, ordinary failures, and painful loss while making room for the gentleness of animals, sprawling countrysides, and the miracle of good books and tea: a cue that inside each of us the certainty to choose this life, again and again, never dims. --Susan L. Leary, author of Dressing the Bear

Author Information

Katherine Riegel's most recent book is a lyric memoir about her sister and grief, Our Bodies Are Mostly Water (Cornerstone Press, 2025). Her previous collections of poetry are Love Songs from the End of the World (Main Street Rag, 2019), Letters to Colin Firth (Winner of the Sundress Publications Chapbook Competition, 2015), What the Mouth Was Made For (FutureCycle, 2013), and Castaway (FutureCycle, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Poets Reading the News, Rattle, SWWIM, Thimble, and elsewhere. Co-founder and managing editor of Sweet (sweetlit.org), she runs online writing classes in poetry and flash creative nonfiction. Find her at katherineriegel.com and in southern Scotland, where she moved in summer 2025 with her British husband, two Golden Retrievers, and two cats. Founding editor, Sheila-Na-Gig Editions

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