Award-winning singer-songwriter and poet Amy Speace will release her debut collection of poetry titled The Cardinals on Tuesday 1st September 2026. It will be published by Red Hen Press. Speace will also be releasing an accompanying single Days Of Letting Go which will arrive three days later.
The Cardinals is described as “a lyrical investigation of marriage, divorce, mothering, and mysticism told through poems that read like intimate conversations but evoke the complexities of love and loss through the natural world. Speace tackles the internal language of coming together and splitting apart, evoking rivers and birds, the South and the North, weather and racism and family history and it all comes together like birdsong”.
The single Days of Letting Go was inspired by a poem titled Bluegrass Highway written as part of her MFA thesis. Speace explains “I went to graduate school in Louisville, Kentucky and somewhere on 65 North there was a large black billboard with white writing that said, ‘Opium Kills. Jesus Saves.’ I was working on a series of ‘persona poems’ – poems where the narrator isn’t me, is a character, a specific voice – and I imagined it as a male narrator driving back home after the funeral of his father’s death. Of course, my own father had died in late 2019 and that was also a subject I was writing about in my work at the time. I wrote the poem with the repeating refrain – clearly in song form – but wanted to keep it a poem, until one of my mentors asked me why it wasn’t a song. I sang the whole thing to my friend Vance Gilbert and he said, ‘you know what would be cool? If you spoke the verse lyrics.’ And I told him it was originally a poem and he laughed.”
Days of Letting Go was recorded at Skinny Elephant Studio in East Nashville, TN and produced by Neilson Hubbard with Speace (vocals), Doug Lancio (guitars), Lex Price (bass), Hubbard (drums) and Danny Mitchell (keyboards).
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