Huckabay, Melissa McEver: Girl Filling the Sky

Cider Press Review, paperback

Publication Date: February 20, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

In her luminous debut, Melissa McEver Huckabay charts a tender reckoning with a childhood shaped by absence, following its echoes through the sensuous spaces of a woman's life. In these poems, a father's abandonment creates both ache and aperture, and a matrilineal thread—woven through mothers, grandmothers, and women artists—offers confirmation that "You can't/ wipe a woman away." Layered with longing, love, and the fierce beauty of the natural world, Girl Filling the Sky sings with bruised truth and a deep-rooted wildness. —Cecily Parks, author of The Seeds

Girl Filling the Skyis a terrific collection of poems to fill a reader's heart—so richly. I love the staggering precision of these poems. How does Melissa McEver Huckabay write without ever including a single extra word? In poems that feel somehow luscious and spare at once, the untwining of her own childhood in Texas pulls us in. Her growing up years...here are people who loved her, people she loved, her own tenderness around mothering. "Maybe that's what a mother becomes:/ a piercing." It's a passionately visual and heartfelt journey, a pleasure to absorb, a haunting meditation on time and care. —Naomi Shihab Nye, poet, essayist, and editor of This Same Sky

I love this book for its near dislocation from wisdom, necessary because Melissa McEver Huckabay's attention is so deeply loyal to embodiment that the perfect clean weight of wisdom is beside the point; this is a poetry that is both drenched and flammable with memory, with entering, being entered, being born and giving birth. These poems will wake readers into a familiar wildness we've too often been told not to touch. These poems, startlingly alive, burn and char and split with all the forms of love one can almost eat. When they locate wisdom, and they do, it's belly deep, female, and unforgettable. —Kathleen Peirce, author of Vault: A Poem