The Unknown Daughter

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who lives alone in the woods. The Unknown Daughter is her ninth poetry collection (partly feminist, partly autobiographical, and part fiction), much of it written during the isolation of Covid. Website: triciaknoll.com

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 change-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."), Tricia Knoll makes her own important contribution.-Penelope Scambly Schott, Author of On Dufur Hill