Description
*** Publication date is November 1, 2026. All pre-sold book will be shipped on that date. ***
You Left Me / Not is a searing, tender chapbook of elegy and devotion by poet Jacqueline Marcus, written in the raw aftermath of losing her husband of forty-eight years, Richard Steven Robbins. Structured as a sequence of dated and undated poems, the collection captures the small, devastating rituals of widowhood: an untouched bowl of Cheerios, a favorite mug left empty on the counter, a border collie waiting by the window for a man who isn’t coming home. This grief is rendered with unflinching honesty and startling beauty. The poems move through the seasons of mourning from the shock of a November night to the fragile hope of spring, tracing one woman’s journey from disbelief to a hard-won, aching acceptance. And yet, Marcus alludes to a Platonic understanding that death is not the end and that her beloved has not left her, “you are with me,” is a constant refrain in these poems.
Praise for the poetry of Jacqueline Marcus
An enormously powerful and accomplished poet. Her poems all have extraordinary authority and presence. There is a grace to her poems that always pleases, and an intelligence to their meditations that is always compelling.
—David St. John, author of Prayer for My Daughter and The Last Troubadour: Selected and New Poems
