When I Was a Grateful Mammal

By Ellen Miller-Mack

Winner of the 2025 Sappho's Prize in Poetry

Ellen Miller-Mack's When I Was a Grateful Mammal startles and crackles, its narrator leveling an unflinchingly poignant, linguistically exact, and often hilarious take on seasons of yearning, tracking the perpetual motion machine that is the human heart. These poems are wised up and yet still vulnerable to intimacies chanced with strangers, to distances sprouted between lovers, to fleeting connections within clinical and institutional spaces, and to the irrepressible joy in the music of the muse who calmly refuses to shut up. Pleasingly irreverent, modernist, and taut, this collection towers above the platitudinous pablum that sometimes passes for poetry. It reminds us of what language can wield-and yield-in the right hands.
--Heather Treseler, author of Auguries & Divinations

Playful, teasing, aching, intimate--Ellen Miller-Mack's fresh take on Sappho's voice sinks a plumb line to the depths of a woman's hunger. These poems are set in our time; we know the bakery, the waiting room, the bookstore launch. But Miller-Mack's ancient muse would have no trouble recognizing herself in the enduring theme of desire and its song-like expression. Other muses appear: Billie Holiday, Georgia O'Keeffe, incarcerated women, the poet's mother, and the abandoned Baby Faluna, miraculously transformed by the poet into the goddess of her lost and found. When I Was a Grateful Mammal is a playlist I'm putting on endless repeat for sheer pleasure.
--Joan Larkin, author of Old Stranger

There's magic here in Miller-Mack's debut collection, When I Was A Grateful Mammal. These poems do the work we need in our lives-that certain clear voice, the music in the poem, the swell of song, that trumpet flower opening in the backyard. In her poem "Summit House," Miller-Mack writes "I can't keep up with the beauty" when in fact poem after poem keeps up with the beauty, embraces it, presents it to the reader. There's wisdom, grief, joy, a sense of humor, precise detail and metaphor in poem after poem-concise, eloquent, sensual, innovative, fresh, complex, and often taking us to places we didn't know we were going to. Hers is a voice one can trust; Miller-Mack keeps her hand on the wheel while gorging "on anything that tastes like love." These are beautiful poems, each one opening line by line in the way of the jimsonweed-the snap of precise, eloquent, smart and perfectly made poems.
-Carol Potter, author of What Happens Next is Anyone's Guess

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GHR5B234
• ISBN13: 9798994547304
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Headmistress Press
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"