Under Blue Skies

Every story in this collection carries the same label: A Love Story. It's a promise the book keeps in ways you won't expect. Across thirty-one stories, love shows up as a slap across a kitchen table, and the mother who leads her children out the door afterward. As a letter that reaches a family two weeks after the hospital bed goes empty. As an atheist and a Catholic learning, awkwardly, to trust each other. As a father's last words to sons who will spend years deciding what to keep of him and what to let go. Moving between quiet domestic rooms and the wider sweep of history — cattle raids, wartime loss, Kenya's long road to self-determination — Under Blue Skies refuses to let love mean only one thing. It is romantic and familial, redemptive and ruinous, sometimes healed and sometimes not. Threaded throughout with an epistolary undercurrent — letters written, letters withheld, letters that arrive too late — and framed by an original title poem, the collection closes with an eleven-poem preview of a forthcoming volume, Weather of You (2027). This is love writing for readers who want the real cost counted: tender only where tenderness has been earned.