In this powerful second poetry collection, award-winning South African poet Jeannie Wallace McKeown maps the landscape of loss with unflinching honesty and lyrical grace.

Set against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, these poems navigate the intimate terrain of grief following the death of her parents, transforming everyday moments—from morning tea to grocery shopping—into profound meditations on love and survival. With clear-eyed precision and without descending into sentimentality, McKeown reminds us that in our shared vulnerability lies our deepest connection to life itself.

These are poems that demand to be felt, understood, and returned to again and again.

Fall Awake is a study in contrasts, exploring belonging and unbelonging; tracking the coming to terms with a fluid sexuality, and examining how relationships work or don't work.

Jeannie McKeown also confronts head-on the terrifying life-changing experience that is motherhood. Sometimes irreverent, always heartfelt, the poems in this collection speak to a particular life, and to what it is to reach the middle of one, and still find yourself with new horizons and more to learn.