The Lantern Keeper's Year
A Novel in Verse

About this book:

On a wind-scoured island three miles off the Maine coast, Ruth tends the light that keeps the dark from swallowing ships whole. *The Lantern Keeper's Year* unfolds in luminous verse, each poem a day's entry in a logbook that records more than weather: the weight of whale oil and winter cabbage, the creep of frost across kitchen glass, the memory of a husband lost to fever, the Captain's whistle fading into gray. Here is solitude rendered not as emptiness but as a presence—granite, salt, the gear-turn of the clockwork, the beam sweeping six seconds white, three seconds shadow—guarding strangers who will never know her name.

Through twenty-six chapters that track the year from October's last steamship to spring's first boat, the novel in verse builds a world where duty and desire are measured in wicks trimmed, stairs climbed, and nights survived. Ruth's voice is sharp as a brass scraper on frozen panes, tender as a shared biscuit with the cat, unflinching as the sea. This is historical fiction stripped to its sinew: a woman claiming authority in a male domain, grief hardening into purpose, the fierce, quiet rebellion of keeping faith with the flame when every wind begs you to let it die.