28,065 Nights was published in September 2020 and is available from River Glass Books or directly from the author: US or international (shipping included).

This chapbook of prose poems explores the ways stories connect us, even, or maybe especially, after death.

Reading Katie Manning’s 28,065 Nights, I felt as if I were examining grief through the ever-changing lens of a telescope. The poems dilate and constrict, homing in on a dab of vanilla in “the small space behind each ear,” then expanding to focus on the soaring vastness of death, “…the great egret at the swamp…the stillness after everyone is gone.” These prose poems are letters to a grandmother whose “body of work is other people’s bodies: children who made children who are still making more children.” Manning reaches to the very core of wonder, awe, loss, and motherhood and transforms enormities—guilt, miscarriage, missed opportunity—into precise sharp moments: a kiss on the forehead, a bite of a fried bologna sandwich, a grandchild’s small nose. I found myself stopping after each poem, breathing deeply at Katie Manning’s mastery, at her love, and how she tells these stories “to keep myself alive.”
– Jennifer Martelli, author of My Tarantella and After Bird

 28,065 Nights is a love song. Katie Manning’s poems are poignant insights into a grandmother’s life, a granddaughter’s devotion. The collection is a treasure.
– Stephen Parrish, editor of The Lascaux Review

Katie Manning’s 28,065 Nights honors a beloved grandmother after her passing. In this work, the title of which evokes Scheherazade, stories are crucial, providing both a well and a path for the poet. Manning sifts grief and love to uncover a treasure trove of objects, sense memories, and tales that, in effect, resurrect a body for the lost that those who remain can hold on to and keep. Throughout, the poet carves precise and honest lines with perception, grace, and palpable love.
– Marjorie Tesser, editor-in-chief of Mom Egg Review

Katie Manning’s 28,065 Nights invites us to witness memories of her close relationship with her grandmother. These prose poems, windows into grandparentland, are small treasures, kept like Granny’s socks packed away with the ashtray from Buckingham Palace. The most valuable things, the ordinary things—the underwear and vanilla, the worn slippers—are almost too good for daily use after Granny is gone. Those glimpses of love and grief keep our hearts soft, childlike throughout this collection. Even once the last of Granny’s lotion is gone, and her house is home to strangers, the stories, tenderly and artfully told, do more than tell of her life and loss, they keep the hearer alive, along with the teller. What a gift to bring us into these intimate scenes, which shine, even in heartache, and remind us to cherish small moments, to write the losses we face so that others’ grief can find some healing and feel less alone in our own close-to-the-bone losses. Manning invites us into these scenes, so we can sit with her at Granny’s table, eating bologna sandwiches, wishing we’d known her, glad we have this way of knowing.
– Sarah Ann Winn, author of Alma Almanac and Ever After the End Matter