Read Joan Leotta’s review of The Unknown Daughter published April 2024 on Verse Virtual.
A poetry chapbook coming from Finishing Line Press. Please visit the publisher’s website for information and order form. The Unknown Daughter is also available on Amazon.
What are these 24 poems in The Unknown Daughter about?
Imagine a monument to the Unknown Daughter as an actual architectural place and destination. Imagine the voices of caretakers, fundraisers, visitors, gardeners at the nearby rose garden, Uber drivers delivering people to the monument, neighbors, high school students who compete in essay contests to make the unknown Known, the daughter and her family. They have much to say about women who are unknown despite the amazing things they have accomplished or unknown for other reasons. The book is dedicated to those unknowns and to my brother.
Two poems from The Unknown Daughter on Verse Virtual, January 2024.
Is the book …
- Autobiographical : yes, a bit
- Fantasy fiction: yes, a bit
- Feminist history : yes, a bit
- Cohesive poems in the voices of people who know unknowns or lost women and babies: absolutely.
What three women poets have said about The Unknown Daughter:
Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter dedicates itself to the incredible work of Making Known: of naming and describing the complex experience of being a daughter, of asking who we might be as a culture and a country if we took it upon ourselves to honestly do so. Knoll’s book is a beautiful, taut series of linked poems filled with myriad voices, each a pebble dropped into the silencing waters of family and history, each helping to recover not just one daughter, but all.
These wise and deft poems are conversation, chorus, and community all in one: they speak right to us; they invite us in. They give crucial instruction in Making Known: “sing when the first impulse may be to whisper.“
Annie Lighthart, Author of Pax
Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter is an un-portrait, individual and collective, historical and visionary, composed by multiple voices constellated via the titular character. This poem sequence strikingly shapes absence from so many presences. It’s a timely reminder that the more things changes– socially, culturally, politically – the more they stay the same, and “the unknown” must claim her own narrative.
Marj Hahne, Writer, Teacher, MFA in Creative Writing
The Unknown Daughter is a worthy monument to a monument that ought to exist. This connected series of poems offers acknowledgement and tribute to those women who didn’t fit the pattern and made major contributions in science and art. In these vivid poems about the symbolic unknown woman, her family, the watchwomen at the memorial, and even an Uber driver (who says dismissively, “You won’t stay long./Tell me if you want me/to drive you somewhere else.â€), Tricia Knoll makes her own important contribution.
Penelope Scambly Schott, author of On Dufur Hill