Texas Birder Press: Rumors of Home

Rumors of Home: Poems About Love, Loss, and the Rooms We Leave Behind is a deeply personal collection of poems shaped by memory, distance, grief, longing, and the strange persistence of love long after people are gone.

Written across many years, these poems move through motel rooms glowing softly at midnight, dusty Texas roads, old photographs, unanswered letters, and the quiet emotional landscapes we carry inside ourselves. At the center of much of the collection is Jane, a woman marked by tragedy, movement, survival, and absence, whose life and loss left an enduring imprint on the author’s heart and work.

Some poems are intimate and confessional. Others drift like half-remembered conversations heard through thin apartment walls at two in the morning. There are moments of tenderness, humor, loneliness, desire, regret, resilience, and the bittersweet realization that certain people never completely leave us, no matter how many years pass.

These are not polished poems written from a safe emotional distance. They are lived-in poems. Weathered poems. Poems written by someone who has loved deeply, lost painfully, and still found reasons to keep moving forward beneath wide skies and long highways.

Yet Rumors of Home is not simply a book about grief. It is also about survival, memory, beauty, and the stubborn human instinct to search for warmth in a cold world. It understands that joy and sorrow are often roommates sharing the same dimly lit kitchen.

With imagery drawn from the American South and West, and a voice that is reflective, honest, and hauntingly human, Michael F. Mathews has created a collection that lingers long after the final page, like motel lights glowing in the rearview mirror on a lonely road home.