Singing Is Praying Twice

Singing Is Praying Twice gives voice to an intergenerational community of women.

"[This poetry collection] is filled with pathos and empathy, populated with memorable characters who alternately amuse, enrage, puzzle, and pull at the heart. Taken together, these linked poems offer up a woman's life in all its complicated fullness, from childhood to motherhood and beyond. And running through and beneath these portraits, there is music-songs sung alone or with others, in unison or in parts, with instruments or unaccompanied, from polkas to lullabies, in sorrow or in joy. In this volume, Peel demonstrates, time and again, how 'singing is praying twice.'"-Laura Apol, author of A Fine Yellow Dust, winner of the Midwest Book Award for Poetry, and Lansing, Michigan, poet laureate (2019-2021)

"In this haunting and deeply felt poetry book, Marianne Peel examines the toll of familial love. Singing Is Praying Twice gives voice to an intergenerational community of women who demand their places in the world. Within an emotionally fraught landscape, where children bend to the whims of their parents and parents struggle to understand their children, Peel writes with the urgency of a truth-teller, sharing the details of a life lived with passion and pain, a place where no matter what happens, 'we carry each other home.'" 

-Erica Goss, Los Gatos, California, poet laureate emerita and author of Night Court