We'll Miss the Stars in the Morning, by Lee Potts

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning, Lee Potts’ second chapbook, seeks to explore the way desires shape our own lives as well as the world we live in. The poems transverse a landscape of human yearning, from personal wishes to the collective dreams that bind all of us.

Many of the poems here happen when a moment of wanting intersects with reality and reveals the beauty and sorrow that ensues. For instance, there is the quiet longing for connection while death waits nearby in “The dust we bring home with us the dust we left behind,” as well as a profound reflection on ambition and legacy in the title poem, “We'll Miss the Stars in the Morning.”

This collection is an invitation to reflect on the ways our desires propel us forward, hold us back, and ultimately shape the course of our time on earth.

"Deep, cool, and dark like the walls of a well, opening to mystery like a night-blooming flower, Lee Potts’ poems offer rich accompaniment for the tender, wondering heart. While the images embrace largeness (constellations, continents, the horizon), they delight in attention to smallness: grains of salt in a bowl, sugar on the back of a spoon. A remarkable collection of poems, beautifully and consciously lyric, that leaves the reader both sated and hungry."

—Han VanderHart, author of What Pecan Light

"In the way that setting is crucial to works of fiction, the environments in Lee Potts’ We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning are like blankets flapped over our heads then left to settle their weight on and around us. The nights are quiet and paranoid, the wind is the keeper of family histories that spill out into the day. In every poem, we are asked to wait in the stillness to hear what the earth has chosen to remember. In a world where the land archives the past, Potts demonstrates beautifully how we might or must remember—trembling in the silence, slow in the watching, rapt with awe."

—Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, winner of the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award

"Here's a secret: there's simply no poet alive whose attention to detail I trust more than Lee Potts's. We'll Miss the Stars in the Morning is a tremendous work—reading it, I felt like I'd slipped on God's overcoat, and found while rummaging through the pockets elegy, stones, shadows, blood, orchards, and ocean. Potts has done the miracle work of taking the past and rendering it into a spangle of constellations—something huge and beautiful that shows us from where we've come and where we are inevitably going. '...father’s watch / is all I’ve given myself / for a compass.'"

—Todd Dillard, Author of Ways We Vanish

Lee Potts (he/him) is founder and editor of the poetry journal Stone Circle Review. He returned to writing poetry in 2017 after a 25-year, post-university hiatus. His poetry has appeared in The Night Heron Barks, Rust + Moth, Whale Road Review, UCity Review, Firmament, Moist Poetry Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, and elsewhere. In 2021, his chapbook, And Drought Will Follow, was published by Frosted Fire Press. He lives just outside of Philadelphia with his wife and daughter.