Finalist, 2026 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

In The Weather Inside, Stevie Edwards measures the emotional atmosphere of a mind navigating bipolar disorder, complex PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, and alcoholism while forging intimacy and creative resilience in a rapidly declining world.

Both as someone who has struggled with mental health and as a feminist approaching middle age, Edwards interrogates parenthood and marriage: What forms of nurturing survive when traditional roles and certainties do not? Can bringing children into a collapsing world still be an act of hope? When your partner does not want children, where should you divert your surfeit of love? The poet grieves, "I am chanting the name of a daughter / my husband doesn't want / enough, the child I've spent years / not being sure I deserved."

This fiercely honest and intimate collection offers a vision of adulthood shaped by the capacity to inhabit an embattled inner world. With clarity and dark wit, Edwards probes the uneasy border between solitude and connection, asserting the relationship between caring for oneself and caring for the wider world.

About the Author

Stevie Edwards is assistant professor of English at Clemson University and poetry editor of The South Carolina Review. She is the author of Quiet Armor, Sadness Workshop, Humanly, and Good Grief.

Reviews

"'I kept you / long past your prime: sweet / funk of rotting stems and all, / I adored you,' Edwards might as well be saying to her past self in The Weather Inside. This wholehearted collection featuring a middle-aged speaker reflecting on the young woman she once was is rife with funny, hearty, sensual poems of willful acceptance in sobriety and committed childlessness. Edwards's is a poetry of insistence. I admire the self-acceptance rendered in the fresh images she's created." -Maya Marshall, author of All the Blood Involved in Love

"The Weather Inside is a beautiful and incisive collection. I love how patient the poems of Stevie Edwards are, how closely they attend to image and the unfolding of the heart. This book is teeming with moments that function as mirrors." -Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

"Edwards's poignant newest collection challenges us to believe it's possible to feel at home in a body, to feel at home in a life. Sweeping across decades spent 'trying to be / the pink spray of glitter bursting / from inside the popped balloon,' these radiant, finely tuned poems examine years mired in major trauma, mental illness, and alcoholism, offering hard-won wisdom at deeply satisfying poetic turns. Fiercely committed to authenticity, Edwards disarms our inner cynics into rooting for love-especially self-love-however tenuous, however incongruous with the hells we've lived through." -Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca

Book Information
ISBN 9781682262870
Author Stevie Edwards
Format Paperback
Page Count 108
Imprint University of Arkansas Press
Publisher University of Arkansas Press
Weight(grams) 172g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm * 8mm