The Annotated Poems of Eleanor Vane
A Novel in Verse

About this book:

In 1927, a Boston heiress vanishes from Saint Botolph Street, leaving behind a brass microscope, a trunk of Donne, and a fiancé. She surfaces at Heron Head, a knife-edge of granite and spruce on Penobscot Bay, where she buys a fisherman's cottage for forty-five dollars and begins writing poems on the backs of grocery receipts, hydrographic charts, and the flyleaves of her father's books. *The Annotated Poems of Eleanor Vane* reassembles her first two winters from the breadbox beneath the woodshed floorboards: salt-cracked manuscripts, iron-gall marginalia, and a scholar's meticulous footnotes mapping the slow alchemy by which a woman trades ledger books for tide tables, Boston charcoal for driftwood's violet flame, and the "stifling, dry dust" of privilege for a life measured in fathoms, frost heaves, and the corrosive chemistry of homemade ink.

Here is a novel in verse that reads like an archaeological dig. Each poem is a sediment layer—*The Salt-Gage*, *Inventory at Twenty-Nine*, *Advice to a Surveyor from Bangor*—annotated with freight manifests, well-water analyses, the price of kerosene at Miller's store, and the identity of the crow that watches the cabbage runnels. The voice strips itself to the bone: laconic, tidal, obsessed with the physics of survival. "I drop my sounding through the quiet weeks / And mark the depth against my growing age." The annotations don't merely explain; they deepen the mystery, revealing the woman behind the margin notes crushing oak galls for ink, whitewashing walls with lime and skimmed milk, rolling a dead seal off the outer rock with a spruce pole.

Part scholarly edition, part ghost story, part coastal survival manual, this is a work that insists poetry is made of the same stuff as the shore: salt, iron, granite, and the stubborn refusal to be erased. For readers of *The Rings of Saturn*, *The Poisonwood Bible*, or anyone who has ever wanted to watch a mind strip itself clean against the elements, *The Annotated Poems of Eleanor Vane* offers a rare, bracing immersion in a life written not on the page but into the landscape itself.