All The Sign Were There

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 Melanie McCabe's fourth collection of poetry 

Winner of the Longleaf Press Poetry Prize

Forthcoming in Winter of 2026

“To date, there has been no bomb,” writes Melanie McCabe in her gorgeously foreboding collection of poems, All the Signs Were There. Here are overgrown vacant lots, ants running in the walls, shadowy relationships, a “coastline of sharp and slice.” This is a powerful book of omens—and of the courage to live through them.

—David Ebenbach, author of What’s Left to Us by Evening

“Feral is the name given to what’s wild/ by what isn’t,” writes Melanie McCabe in this shimmering sequence that maps the heart’s bewitching cartography. Traveling through the lush landscapes of childhood and adolescence where fields reveal “the sudden stonehenge of a lone/gate,” to the stormy world of adulthood where “[m]orning, still beating, is swallowed/mouse-whole down a snake,” McCabe pays tribute to time’s uncanny passage. Here, lovers clasp hands and plunge like “banished angels” from an “edge” they carved themselves, while teenaged rivals reunite late in life, carving out friendship, forgiveness, and healing. All the Signs Were There is filled with breathtaking insight and painterly vision.

—Jane Satterfield, author of The Badass Brontës

On behalf of all of us at Longleaf-- and previous Longleaf Press Book Prize winners--who helped read and comment on hundreds of manuscripts, I want to celebrate All the Signs Were There, the intelligence and range of Melanie McCabe's atmospheric poems and her unique and otherworldly ear for the language. We were riveted: "/the air that finds my lungs is chosen for its jade/ stillness. Each breath for its lull."  

—Roger Weingarten, Publisher, Longleaf Press

Available for pre-order from Longleaf Press:

 https://longleafpress.org/product/preorder-all-the-signs-were-there-by-melanie-mccabe/ 

Links to order from Amazon and Barnes & Noble coming soon.

Melanie McCabe's third collection moves like a record, cyclical  and singing.

These elegiac poems turn over the tender and fraught  intimacy of two sisters-one gone and one left to tell their story.

The  reader is invited into their shared history via a wonderfully precise  imagination that is grounded in the real.

This speaker is haunted, not  by spirits, but by the physical world that her sister has departed, as  in the opening of "Days That Should Have Been Yours" "Damp earth and  honeysuckle rise into the air / I am left with." 

Each poem brims with a  quiet intensity. As a collection, they hover like a  murmuration-cohesive, sensual, just high enough to see everything  clearly.  

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 In these poems, Melanie McCabe traces the disintegration of a  marriage and the loss of a house lived in for decades. The poems explore  not only the end of a relationship, but also the deep and personal  attachment that people form with the home they live in.

Here also are  poems about a childhood home and of days spent as a young mother in the  house that must now be sold. Throughout this profoundly honest  collection are love poems—written not only to a husband, but to a  parent, a child, and even to a beloved house itself.

In the title poem, McCabe alludes to the limited view, the fragmented and incomplete  stories our neighbors form as they bear witness to only a part of our  lives—and never to the complete truth. Here the reader glimpses that  truth, sees beyond the blinds, the closed curtains, to find a woman living a life that many will recognize as their own. 

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In Melanie McCabe’s History of the Body, the  body becomes history, the vessel of lived experience, of touching the  world and being touched, and gesturing beyond that world’s physical  confines.

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