Tricia Knoll moved to Vermont in 2018. She has learned to love winter although sometimes thinks February is too long and rejoices when the sap starts running. Her work appears widely in journals as diverse as Kenyon Review and New Verse News. Her poetry is published into nine books — both chapbooks and full-length. This poem comes from a 2024 book, Wild Apples from Fernwood Press. The poems trace downsizing, moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont, running into the isolation of Covid-time, and welcoming two grandsons. Knoll is a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual.

Other poems on the web by Tricia Knoll:
Two poems
Two poems
"I Saw Winter's Witches"
"Under Thunder"
"I want to write"
"The Only Explanation"
Two poems
Three poems
Two poems

Tricia Knoll's Website.

About Wild Apples:

"'The bones of this land are not mine,' writes Tricia Knoll, longtime Oregon poet moved to the woods of northern Vermont, but in Wild Apples the reader sees the poet begin to make it her own. Here she awaits and then welcomes a first grandchild, telling him what she holds sacred: milkweed, horses, dogs...and the list ends with poetry and songs by people who tell the truth. This poet has brought with her the gift of telling truth with beauty."
—Penelope Scambly Schott

"I laugh with Knoll's humor, wit, imagination and sly cultural critiques' discarding the body, but keeping a doll's head and stitching it with white dog hair to look more like the speaker. I find balm in the sense of connection to family, friends, and those unmet: the previous homeowner, the Native Americans who never willingly ceded their lands; the flora and fauna, even gravel, dirt and potholes, since the road is in me,/I am not lost. To ending the book with a wonderfully unanswerable question, Which where emerges/at the end of when?, I can only say: Bravo! "
—April Ossmann

"While reading Tricia Knoll's WILD APPLES, the latest of her five volumes of poems, I was struck by how she transforms the everyday into the luminous by interweaving human lives with their landscapes, whether the American Northwest of Oregon's coasts or the seasons of Vermont's forested terrain. The span of the continent becomes a way to examine the span of a life, its history and rhythms embedded in both seasonal and geographic explorations. The move across country becomes a renewal, an acknowledgement of aging, of change in the context of new birth in the grandson born in Vermont under the looming shadow of the pandemic. Along the way, Tricia Knoll's tribute to Ruth Stone in the poem by that name and her recognition of the poet David Budbill's significant choice to be a Recluse on Jude vine Mountain reinforce what she names in her poem, Thirty Things a Poet Should Know 'what you are looking for is not lost/the moon is there, somewhere.' Vermont proves to be rich soil for Knoll as well as for Stone and Budbill even as she acknowledges the limits of what she can claim in 'The Newcomer Begs the Land': 'The bones of this land are not mine. . . This forest became mine/through thefts with many names I know.' Both the Pacific Northwest and Vermont'ss Northeast bear evidence of earlier life on this continent. The life Tricia Knoll examines acknowledges this past while turning her face toward the future in 'Rowens' when she writes: 'We are second harvests, little one, . . .May we be useful, tender, help feed/the world's hunger despite our acres/of discontent. To ripen into the best/we're called to be in separate seasons.'"
—Mary Jane Dickerson