I haven't really figured out how to promote the book yet but I am working on it. Though the book has slid up and down the list, yesterday almost sliding off when Amazon ran out of books, it rose back up to #5, then 7 today, and has remained on the list these twenty days it has been out. Pub day far exceeded my wildest expectations. The first time I saw it my book was sitting in the #2 position right between Laurie Halse Anderson and Jason Reynolds on a list called Hot New Releases in Poetry for teens and young adults! I was stunned and overjoyed. Yet more exciting was waking up the next morning to find For to See the Elephant on a couple of Amazon's lists of bestsellers. It was fun to have an event, my first official reading as Portsmouth Poet Laureate, on the same day as the book came out, which allowed me to sell and sign books. I feel like I've been for an elephant ride! It has been such a whirlwind since publication day, of exciting ups and downs. That is what Eagle Pond Farm was a farm where the harvest was not so much livestock or vegetables or even flowers, but of poems, and seldom has the harvest been so bountiful at any farm anywhere.īelow I share some of my photos from our field trip. There were poems at every turn in the teacups in old pantry cupboards, in the walking stick I found still propped near an old back door, in the cherub tacked over the kitchen sink's window (which came home with me). Oddly enough, there was some reverence to it imagining them both there, touching the items that the heirs and auction house thought unimportant but that the poets themselves couldn't part with. There was a sadness in that, of course, and there was some sadness in being among the hordes of people trodding through his beloved home and ransacking his stuff, but we were both glad we took the trip. Both of us had wanted to and discussed making this trip before he had passed, but we never got it done. On Mother's Day my friend Erine Leigh (the tenth Portsmouth Poet Laureate) and I took a little road trip to attend the closing day of the estate sale at Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire, the long time home of Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon.