Some inheritances don't come in wills. They come in weather — the storms a family makes and hands down without ever naming them. Things We Didn't Name is a memoir in verse: twenty-four poems and eight songs tracing a single lesson as it travels through three generations. A mother who left in a Des Moines winter. A father who was honorable and gone. A grandfather at the end of a bar in a harbor town. And a boy who learned to call distance safety because no one had given him a better word for it. This is not a book of blame. It refuses to make villains of the wounded. It does not mistake survival for victory, or understanding for pardon. It simply names what went unnamed — and asks whether a thing, once named, can finally be set down before it's handed to the next pair of hands. For anyone who has loved someone difficult. For anyone who became difficult. For anyone still deciding what to pass on.