Beyond Chittering Cottage

Poems of Place.

Did you know that an orb weaver spider "eats" her web? Or that Smilax thorns come from a series of tumorous rhizomes connected underground? Rachel S. Donahue didn't either, until she started paying attention. After living the nomadic life of an overseas worker, Rachel found herself settled on one plot of land for more than five years with ample time for observation.

These poems reveal what she's seen beyond the spiders, birds, and vines—the deeper struggles and shimmering mystery of life on this corner of the earth.

“The best poetry helps us see and hear that which we might otherwise take for granted or fail to notice. Rachel S. Donahue’s poetry helps us appreciate ordinary, domestic life for what it is: magical, meaningful, and anything but mundane. These lyrics are deceptively simple. This means they are welcoming as open doors, but they are not simplistic. They are more like a house with many rooms and this collection is worth the slow wandering of reading and re-reading. Rachel writes the glory of her ordinary life so that we can better see our own.” 

–Christie Purifoy, author of Roots and Sky and Placemaker

Rachel S. Donahue

Rachel Donahue isn’t a typical homeschooling mother of four: after finishing her English degree, she and her husband, Mick, moved to Spain and spent the next dozen years in cross-cultural ministry. When family circumstances brought them back to North Carolina, a return to literature ushered her into a new season of writing: both poetry and the beginnings of a novel. Friendships with other writers, combined with her editing experience and design work, led to the publication of her first book: Real Poems for Real Moms: from a Mother in the Trenches to Another.