From the banks of the Ohio to the shadow of the Alps, these poems chart a journey through grief and joy, rootedness and displacement, endings and beginnings.

In 2021, John Paul Wright stood at the convergence of love and loss—his father's death arriving on the same day his Austrian fiancée landed in Louisville for the first time. The poems that follow trace the years after that impossible meeting: a whirlwind courtship and marriage, a honeymoon through the American South, and the leap across the Atlantic to build a life in Lustenau, Austria—80 miles from where his ancestors began their journey centuries ago.

Here, a river worker and self-taught poet navigates the strange mirrors between Louisville and Lustenau, Schnitzelburg and the Rhine Valley, homesickness and homecoming. From playing gospel music with an Austrian choir to wrestling with German language exams, from graveside eulogies to newlywed wonder, Wright writes with the clear-eyed tenderness of someone learning what it means to belong to more than one place at once.

These are poems about what we carry with us and what we leave behind—prayers for the living and resolutions for the lost, written by a man discovering that the quiet places aren't always where we expect to find them.