A woman considers pregnancy, motherhood, and the nature of female relationships in this profound and provocative novel. Twelve weeks pregnant for the first time, Anna speaks to her sister on the other side of the country and learns she has just miscarried her second child. As this loss strains their bond and complications with Anna's own pregnancy emerge, her tenuous steps towards motherhood are shadowed and illuminated by the women she meets along the way, whose stories of the children they have had, or longed for, or lost, crowd in. The Long Answer is a stunning novel of secrets kept, and secrets shared. Deeply empathetic and hugely absorbing, it unravels the intimate dynamics of female friendship, sisterhood, motherhood and grief, and the ways that women are bound together and pulled apart by their shared and contrasting experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and infertility.

A woman considers pregnancy, motherhood, and the nature of female relationships in this profound and provocative novel. Twelve weeks pregnant for the first time, Anna speaks to her sister on the other side of the country and learns she has just miscarried her second child. As this loss strains their bond and complications with Anna's own pregnancy emerge, her tenuous steps towards motherhood are shadowed and illuminated by the women she meets along the way, whose stories of the children they have had, or longed for, or lost, crowd in. The Long Answer is a stunning novel of secrets kept, and secrets shared. Deeply empathetic and hugely absorbing, it unravels the intimate dynamics of female friendship, sisterhood, motherhood and grief, and the ways that women are bound together and pulled apart by their shared and contrasting experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and infertility.

The Long Answer gleans from David Keplinger's five previous poetry collections, covering two decades of his engagement with the lyric narrative. Through echoes of Dickinson, Rimbaud, William Blake, and the French prose poet Max Jacob, as well as a host of other European and American voices, this volume maps the ongoing "long answer" to the poet's individual inquiries about family, influence, and originality while at the same time tapping the source and substance of a more far-flung, philosophical problem. How is one life both distinct from and the sum of lives that came before? How does one disentangle oneself from the illusion of separateness? Culling together the best work from those previous years, and with nearly forty new pages of material, The Long Answer seeks a question, in Keplinger's title poem, "so old, no one remembers/ what was asked for/in the first place, /and which leaves us . . . /with only each other." His work, here, and historically, seeks less to alter thinking than to undrape it, where poetry can be the means of remembering what we are.

Contains the 4th session of the 28th Parliament through the session of the Parliament.