Publication Date: October 15, 2026
Paperback, 102 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-64-2
A collection of poetry ruminating on evolutionary stories of loss, survival, and perseverance, with a highlighted focus on explorative discoveries of the natural Earth, providing further musings on the strengths of humanity.
Praise for Mary K O’Melveney & What Remains?
Mary K. O’Melveny’s newest collection is beautiful and ambitious, sampling broadly from human experience around the globe and diving vertically into time in poems that evoke rich histories from her mother’s stories, her great-grandmother’s sampler, and further back, deeper down. Beyond the personal artifact, fascinating natural research offers anchor and refrain. These poems introduce us to radioactive wasp nests, the syntax of whale songs, and to jellyfish who mutate inexorably toward salvation.
—Dave Essinger, Professor of English, University of Findlay, author of This World and The Next
Why do we read poetry? To engage our senses, and to test our capacity for feeling. To experience the poet’s use of language that, when effective, promotes the potential for our own updated relationship with it. And to invite personal reflection on complex human and earthly experiences. In What Remains? Mary K O’Melveny provides readers an opportunity to interact with our mysterious, beauteous world through the lens of history, with a keen eye on the fragility of the planet and how respect for it – and for creatures depending on it, including our fellow humans – can lighten despair, build hope, and open windows to a healthy perspective. The experience of taking in the poems within this book is a wondrous and soulfully healing journey.
—Joe Maita, Editor/Publisher, Jerry Jazz Musician
Mary K O’Melveny’s new poetry volume, What Remains?, questions how we endure, find hope, in times of loss, grief, and crisis—personal, political, environmental, global. These poems offer illuminating and memorable visions of the decline of past civilizations, observations of the natural world, witnessing of present disasters—both environmental and global—and their impact, eschewing despair and reveling in natural phenomena, particularly the joys of birdsong, art, music, and moments of beauty and memory. With evocative, original, and startling imagery that also suggests profound philosophical exploration, she creates a poetic universe in which forms of loss are countered with the traces of all “that remains.” This is a volume that a reader will savor, return to for its complex visions and offers of spiritual sustenance.
—Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, author of Foraging for Light Over the Moon Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini
About the Author
Mary K O’Melveny is the author of five poetry collections and a chapbook, including an album of poetry and music If You Want To Go To Heaven, Follow A Songbird (Jerry Jazz Musician 2024); Flight Patterns (Kelsay 2023) (nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award); Merging Star Hypotheses (Finishing Line 2020), semi-finalist, The Washington Prize/The Word Works). Rhina P. Espaillat, poet, essayist and short-story writer described Mary’s poetry in Dispatches From The Memory Care Museum (Kelsay 2021) as “nakedly genuine” …. of “consoling and enriching value.” Mary’s award-winning poems are widely published in print and on-line literary journals, anthologies and poetry blog sites. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is a member of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group and co-authored the Group’s two published anthologies. A retired labor rights lawyer, Mary lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York, teaches writing classes and supports social justice causes.
Publication Date: October 15, 2026
Paperback, 102 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-64-2
A collection of poetry ruminating on evolutionary stories of loss, survival, and perseverance, with a highlighted focus on explorative discoveries of the natural Earth, providing further musings on the strengths of humanity.
Praise for Mary K O’Melveney & What Remains?
Mary K. O’Melveny’s newest collection is beautiful and ambitious, sampling broadly from human experience around the globe and diving vertically into time in poems that evoke rich histories from her mother’s stories, her great-grandmother’s sampler, and further back, deeper down. Beyond the personal artifact, fascinating natural research offers anchor and refrain. These poems introduce us to radioactive wasp nests, the syntax of whale songs, and to jellyfish who mutate inexorably toward salvation.
—Dave Essinger, Professor of English, University of Findlay, author of This World and The Next
Why do we read poetry? To engage our senses, and to test our capacity for feeling. To experience the poet’s use of language that, when effective, promotes the potential for our own updated relationship with it. And to invite personal reflection on complex human and earthly experiences. In What Remains? Mary K O’Melveny provides readers an opportunity to interact with our mysterious, beauteous world through the lens of history, with a keen eye on the fragility of the planet and how respect for it – and for creatures depending on it, including our fellow humans – can lighten despair, build hope, and open windows to a healthy perspective. The experience of taking in the poems within this book is a wondrous and soulfully healing journey.
—Joe Maita, Editor/Publisher, Jerry Jazz Musician
Mary K O’Melveny’s new poetry volume, What Remains?, questions how we endure, find hope, in times of loss, grief, and crisis—personal, political, environmental, global. These poems offer illuminating and memorable visions of the decline of past civilizations, observations of the natural world, witnessing of present disasters—both environmental and global—and their impact, eschewing despair and reveling in natural phenomena, particularly the joys of birdsong, art, music, and moments of beauty and memory. With evocative, original, and startling imagery that also suggests profound philosophical exploration, she creates a poetic universe in which forms of loss are countered with the traces of all “that remains.” This is a volume that a reader will savor, return to for its complex visions and offers of spiritual sustenance.
—Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, author of Foraging for Light Over the Moon Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini
About the Author
Mary K O’Melveny is the author of five poetry collections and a chapbook, including an album of poetry and music If You Want To Go To Heaven, Follow A Songbird (Jerry Jazz Musician 2024); Flight Patterns (Kelsay 2023) (nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award); Merging Star Hypotheses (Finishing Line 2020), semi-finalist, The Washington Prize/The Word Works). Rhina P. Espaillat, poet, essayist and short-story writer described Mary’s poetry in Dispatches From The Memory Care Museum (Kelsay 2021) as “nakedly genuine” …. of “consoling and enriching value.” Mary’s award-winning poems are widely published in print and on-line literary journals, anthologies and poetry blog sites. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is a member of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group and co-authored the Group’s two published anthologies. A retired labor rights lawyer, Mary lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York, teaches writing classes and supports social justice causes.
