Selected Writing by Helene Kiser
I write about the moments when language fails us — and the ways it can also sustain us. My work explores grief, love, loss, and transformation.
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Your Wife Knows You Are Here (book excerpt) Hippocampus Magazine
My Strong, Loving Husband Died Just 5 Months After Being Diagnosed With Cancer Huffington Post
After My Husband Died, My Family Skipped the Holidays Today/NBC
The Zippo Lighter The Keepthings
Something Blue. Five Minute Lit
I Mocked People with Tattoos Until My Husband DiedBusiness Insider
It Took Me 7 Years To Bury My Husband. Here's What I Learned About Grief Huffington Post
An Old Man’s Game Next Avenue
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How to Live While Dying, Sibylline Press (forthcoming 2028)
Topography, Linear Arts Books
Delicious Imaginations: Conversations with Contemporary Writers, Purdue University Press (contributor)
My Heart’s First Steps: Mothers and Fathers on Parenthood, Adams Media Corporation (contributor)
So You Think Your Child May Be Gifted?The Old Schoolhouse Books
Contemporary Black/Hispanic Biography; Newsmakers; Notable Women Scientists; BioRC, and other Thomson Gale Cengage reference collections (contributor)
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Gentling the Wild Beast: Imagery as a Path to Grief Writing The Brevity Blog
Writing Behind the Locked Door: Reaching Readers when Sharing Grief and Trauma The Forever Workshop
20 Minutes of Daily, Focused Freewriting is Responsible for My Sanity Hippocampus Magazine
The 8 Enemies of Strong Sentences: How to Self-Edit Your Writing and Make Every Word Count The Forever Workshop
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52 Writing Prompts: Inspiration for the Creative Writer by Suzanne Roberts Hippocampus Magazine
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“Bathsheba, to Her First Son,” Clockhouse
“Damsel Fish,” Hawaii Review
“The Farmer’s Wife,” Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review
“The Prodigal Mother,” The Paterson Literary Review
“Neighborhood,” Gulf Coast
“Night Pushing In,” Indiana Review
“Shipshewana,” Sycamore Review
“The Sandhill Cranes,” Midwest Poetry Review
“The Barn’s Blue Light,” Poem
“Divorce, Waking Alone,” Poet Lore
“No Safe Place,” Midwest Poetry Review
“On the Toddler Wing of Riley Children’s Hospital,” Connecticut River Review
“Observations on Returning After Vacation,” Chachalaca Poetry Review
“The Shunammite,” in Joyful Woman
“Demokleides, Son of Demetrios,” The Cape Rock
“Evidence of Habit,” Hiram Poetry Review
“Other Things Being Equal,” Salonika Quarterly
“Job’s Wife,” Ancient Paths
“Arabica Coffee Shop,” Semi-Dwarf Review
“Dusk,” Salonika Quarterly
“Carpe Diem,” Pegasus
“Hogging the Ball,” Soundings East
“Tapestry I + II” Yellow Silk
“The Hour Before Dawn,” Poem
“Gardening,” Echoes
“Foretelling Love,” Mobius
“Cubism,” The Iconoclast
“Growing Up,” Poem
“The Harlot,” Pygmy Forest Press Broadside Series
“The Light Fantastic,” The Cape Rock
“Mother Dies, the Boys Go Hunting,” Echoes
“White Flowers,” Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review
“Poverty and Splendor,” Midwest Poetry Review
“That Domestic Circle,” Sycamore Review
Featured Work
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Your Wife Knows You Are Here
"What’s your name? Your birthday? And today’s date? each nurse asks him every few hours. He always gets the first two questions correct, but not the third."
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We Skip the Holidays Every Year
"Our society unofficially allows just one year for grief, an antiquated notion that puts an impossible and unbending stopwatch on human emotion. After that, well, it’s just too much, you need to get over it, move on with your life."
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A Permanent Love Note from The Dead
"That's when I realized a tattoo is a scar. The wound—and its permanence—is freely chosen."
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I Waited Seven Years to Bury My Husband
"We don’t usually talk about grief as trauma, yet that’s exactly what it is."
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Too Late for the Moonshot
"At first, we didn’t say anything. We just gripped each other’s hands like we were clinging to life. On the street corner, Kai stumbled a bit, grabbed onto our neighbor’s stone retaining wall. He looked at the November sky, the nearly bare trees, the dog."
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Gentling the Wild Beast
"In my husband’s dream about a month before he died, he saw me seated at a table in a funky bookstore, a steaming mug of tea and a stack of books waiting to be signed."
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"Helene doesn't pull any punches...her writing is transcendent and so engaging."
— Joelle Frasier
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"A virtuoso writer...nothing here does not in some way relate, associatively or by sound or by symbolic resemblance."
— Tony Hoagland
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"A poet with both narrative and lyric gifts. [Kiser's work] is whole and vivid and full of lucid human business of the heart and mind."
— Thomas Lux
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“The playfulness, the comic leaking in makes the work more serious, in the real scale of life itself.”
— Marianne Boruch
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“Her writing has exceptional range, both stylistically and thematically….moving from the intensely personal to universal relevance with seamless transitions.”
— Jim Peterson
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“Helene is smart, not just in the book sense, but street smart as well….a terrific sense of humor and wildly inventive.”
—Patricia Henley
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“Wonderfully, vividly rendered…I’ll never forget these sentences.”
—Deborah Way
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“Helene’s sense of meaning is sophisticated and astute.”
—Joan Aleshire
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“A free associative experience with room for argument, ambiguity, and play.”
—Eleanor Wilner
Grief Essays
MY UPCOMING BOOK
A meditation on mortality and an exploration of language’s limits, How to Live While Dying inhabits the liminal space of anticipatory grief — grief before loss — where hope and despair coexist. Using an innovative structure that weaves etymology, literary terms, and linguistic analysis alongside both my husband’s journal entries and my personal narrative chronicling the five months between his stage IV cancer diagnosis and death, the book examines — through a rare dual perspective — how language fails and sustains us during our most profound experiences.
How to Live While Dying
Actual cover coming soon