Morning Moon

In Morning Moon, Laura Schaeffer captures the human experience in verse, where grief and joy dance in delicate balance beneath nature’s watchful gaze. Her poetry illuminates the sacred in the ordinary, transforming fleeting moments into eternal truths. Like its namesake – that ethereal glimpse of the moon in daylight – these poems hover between realms, offering both solace and revelation. Schaeffer’s voice rings with quiet wisdom and steadfast hope, guiding readers through landscapes both physical and spiritual. This collection stands as a testament to poetry’s enduring power to heal, challenge, and uplift the human spirit.

-Tamarah Rockwood, CEO, Bainbridge Island Press

Morning Moon is a precise, aching, and expansive exploration of grief. Schaeffer’s poems trace the arc of this familial grief, rendered in terse, vibrant lines: “Cells bloom. / Trunks narrow in reduced frame.” The speaker finds kinship with “small things” – a mustard seed, weavers, clematis, a moth (“Yes, you want a small word that returns everything lost”). Schaeffer delivers strange, harrowing moments (“Last night a woman lied down on the railroad tracks”) alongside intimate ones (“Your form adorned the day more than color”), seeking completion: “But you, lesser light, disappearing, // showed a way out.”

-Tristan Beach, PhD Candidate, Rhetoric and Writing Studies, University of Nevada, Reno

Laura Schaeffer’s poems live at the edge of perception. In doing so, they reveal what is most central to the cosmos.

-Sarah Townsend, author, Setting the Wire: A Memoir of Postpartum Psychosis