An Intimate Poetry Collection About Waiting, Becoming, and the Seasons That Shape Us

In the waiting season, poet Lara Payne explores the fragile intersections of motherhood, loss, memory, and the natural world. Moving through gardens, changing seasons, family relationships, pregnancy, and grief, these poems consider what it means to wait for life to unfold—and how we carry what cannot be recovered.

Payne’s precise, lyrical poems find meaning in the smallest details: a cicada wing, a milkweed pod, crocuses emerging from the earth, seeds opening after a fire, and food slowly going to seed. The natural world becomes both witness and companion as the poet confronts childbearing, child-rearing, a mother’s absence, violence, love, and the passage of time.

Tender without sentimentality and intimate without losing sight of the universal, the waiting season invites readers to consider what we are promised, what we are destined to lose, and how memory allows us to carry beloved people and experiences forward.

Poetry of Motherhood, Grief, Nature, and Transformation

Organized into four interconnected sections, this collection moves between the corporeal and the ethereal. Payne’s poems trace the emotional cycles of loss and becoming, showing how moments of grief, wonder, loneliness, and gratitude often exist alongside one another.

Through exacting craft and acute attention, the waiting season offers solace for anyone navigating uncertainty, transition, or longing. These poems do not promise easy answers. Instead, they ask readers to trust the mysteries of the body, the earth, and the changing seasons.

Discover a Poetry Collection That Explores:

• Motherhood, pregnancy, childbearing, and child-rearing

• Miscarriage, grief, memory, and emotional healing

• Womanhood and the body’s experience of time

• Gardens, seasonal change, and the restorative power of nature

• Family relationships, love, absence, and renewal

Perfect for Thoughtful Readers and Gifting

the waiting season is an affecting choice for readers of contemporary poetry, women’s poetry, nature writing, and literary collections centered on motherhood, grief, healing, and transformation. It also makes a meaningful gift for poetry lovers and anyone moving through a season of waiting, loss, or personal change.

Praise for the waiting season

“the waiting season establishes Lara Payne as a ‘poet’s poet’… To read Lara Payne’s new collection is to find solace in our waiting.”

—Dina Greenberg, author of Prayers for the Lost & for the Living and Nermina’s Chance

“Reading them brought me closer to my own body-in-time, and left me… ‘spelled, unanchored, almost floating.’”

—Sally Rosen Kindred, author of Where the Wolf

“A wild thing indeed, this mesmerizing collection leaves me feeling it all: giddiness, gratitude, and at once, grave awareness of life’s aches and abandon.”

—Avia Tadmor, author of Song in Tammuz, winner of the Berkshire Prize

About the Author

Lara Payne is a poet and educator living in Maryland. She is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Maryland and has taught creative writing at the college level, in public schools, and within community settings.

Her poetry has appeared in publications including The Mom Egg Review, SWWIM, The Delmarva Review, Lines + Stars, and Switched-on-Gutenberg. Her poem “Corn Stand, 10 Ears for Two Dollars” received a Moving Words award and was displayed on Arlington Transit buses. She has also been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

the waiting season is her debut poetry collection.