“Waking Up Alone,” poetry by Michael Hettich

Tender.

Poignant.

Evocative.

Unflinching.

Waking Up Alone (Redhawk Publication, 2026) by multiple award-winning poet Michael Hettich is all that—and more. Heartbreaking and authentic, these are elegiac poems by a poet at the height of his talents writing about the loss of a much-beloved wife after 44 years of marriage. Dedicated to Colleen Ahern-Hettich, there are ten poems with a natural cadence in the 87-page book, and the titular poem takes up some 46 pages. And well it should as this title poem— nuanced, layered, raw, resonant, and often melancholic—is an exquisite piece of work.

Blending images from the natural world, personal events, sensory elements, and a kind of dreamscape, with moments of surrealism, Michael not only captures and conveys anguish—but he also celebrates who Colleen was and what their lives together had been. It also asks who Michael Hettich will be now that he is without her. He notes: “I was taken to a place I haven’t returned from. Never again the same person…” He asks: “How do I grasp who I am now and make it larger, / able to hold you here with me / for as long as I live?”

Yet, please do not think this is only a melancholy reflection of grief, because the poems are also vivid snapshots of life shared with an abundance of love, with a keen awareness and appreciation for both the gift of Colleen and the natural world. Michael acknowledges: “I am mostly filled with gratitude. / Sometimes she could open my body like a window, / something to see through. And let the birds fly in.”

As with the best elegies, “Waking Up Alone” celebrates who Colleen Ahern-Hettich was and shares her with readers who did not know her. “Her intelligence, so lightly worn, [was] like a cashmere scarf / or glittery earrings, that set off her blue eyes.” This was a woman who rode her bike to work, even in the rain, and often without a helmet. Who “lived with gods and miracles / without worrying, really, whether they were real.” A woman strong enough to renovate a “falling-down shack /…the kind of place / a children’s book artist might draw, for the elves.” A woman who “loved the way the frogs sang, in our little puddle-pond,” and who would “sneak up on them and watch them sitting in the sun.” Someone who drew beautifully with a “sure sense of line” and who found art in nature. A woman who “collected spice and jelly jars, / filled them with pebbles, delicate eggs, / butterfly wings” and “lined the windowsills with them.”

While the story of Michael and Colleen carries immense impact, readers should not overlook the talent, technique, and skill utilized in creating these resonant poems. For instance, as the previous paragraph illustrates in part, Michael is a master at using the telling details to reveal the person Colleen was. A woman who “changed the window glass / and made the windows open with ease, / then forgot and left them open, and let the little birds fly in.”

Michael Hettich also excels at evoking the senses to create works so vibrant and radiant that readers can immerse themselves fully into the world of the poem. One can enter the forest where he hears “the wood frogs singing / with what sounded like joy” and where there are “wind chimes in the mountain laurel ringing in the breeze.” Not just the sounds and the visuals but taste too. He speaks of the “sweet taste of rain on her cheeks” and how on a beach near Charleston they could “taste the salt air’s rotting fecundity.” Nor does he overlook the tactile or sense of smell. “She loved the feel of sunburn on her shoulders.” Together, they enjoyed a Florida lake “fragrant with grasses, the sweet smell of something / blooming off in the distance.”

There are also surreal moments, and dreamscapes, in which, for example, “the normally skittish deer / pretend to be coats in her closet.” Yet when he calls out to the deer, they turn into “dream trees.” And these dream trees are “trees bearing fruit we’ll never taste / though we’ll yearn all our lives for their sweetness.”

Too, there is wisdom found in these verses: “The trick is, the truth is, keep looking, take nothing / for granted.”

Solace in the natural world, especially the woods and mountains of their Carolina home, is a theme in Waking Up Alone. In the poem “Solstice,” Michael speaks of how “we bundle up, sit out and watch” the mountains “as the day turns toward darkness.” In so watching these mountains “[w]e think about…how many / now-extinct animals / have walked across their bodies.” He concludes the poem:

…so I bow in gratitude

again and yet again to the mountains, who will be here

 

just as they are, when we’re so long gone

even our language is forgotten.

Yet, though our language might eventually be forgotten, Michael seems to be finding a kind of reconciliation when he observes: “Slowly I’m creating the language I need / to embrace you, my love, in your absence.”

Waking Up Alone won the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2025 Lena M. Shull Book Award. Previously Michael had won this same prestigious award in 2020 for The Mica Mine. While most of his more than a dozen books of poetry have won awards, he apparently is the only person to have won the Shull Award twice.

Michael explains in his note at the end that he wrote “Waking Up Alone” in the immediate aftermath of his wife’s death on January 13, 2025. He acknowledges the “poem came quickly, amidst almost overwhelming grief.” He also says he “edited only lightly” and concludes with saying: “Somehow the nuances of emotion and experience I hope to convey here feel truer when their song is more keening than melodious.”

The painting on the cover of the book is by Colleen Ahern-Hettich.

Michael Hettich

Michael Hettich spent his childhood in Manhattan and Mamaroneck and then earned an MA in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Denver and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from the University of Miami. He lived for many years in South Florida where he taught at Miami Dade College and was awarded an Endowed Teaching Chair. His work has appeared in many prestigious journals including Orion, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Poetry East, Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness, and The Literary Review. His writing has also appeared in a number of anthologies, including Visiting Bob: 100 Poems for Bob Dylan (New Rivers Press, 2018) and Rewilding: Poems for the Environment (Flexible Press, 2020). His many awards include the Hudson-Fowler Award in Poetry (2023), The Brockman-Campbell Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society (The Halo of Bees), several Florida Individual Artists Fellowships, a Florida Book Award, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, the David Martinson–Meadow Hawk Prize, and the 2020  and 2025 Lena M. Shull Book Award. He is the author of many books of poetry, including his more recent A Sharper Silence and The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems 1990-2023. He lives in North Carolina.

“The Meadow” is a copyrighted poem from Waking Up Alone and it appears here in its entirety with the permission of Michael Hettich.