PREORDER: All the Signs Were There, by Melanie McCabe
$18.99
This book is available for PREORDER ONLY. Books will be mailed after publication on February 10, 2026.
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
“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
