A Complete Edition of the Works of Nancy Luce

In 1875, a reclusive New England woman named Nancy Luce assembled this collection of poems, prayers, and personal reflections, driven by an unusual devotion: her beloved pet chickens. Writing from a life marked by sickness, solitude, and profound empathy, Luce poured her grief and faith into verses that treat her feathered companions as soulmates rather than barnyard animals. The collection moves between spiritual meditation and raw sorrow, between prayers for the sick and elegies for chickens named and mourned as children. This is not the work of a conventional poet. It is the voice of a woman who found transcendence in the smallest creatures, who saw suffering everywhere and responded with tenderness. The result is eccentric, uneven, and utterly disarming: a window into a 19th-century American consciousness where the boundaries between the sacred and the ordinary, the human and the animal, dissolved completely. For readers drawn to forgotten voices, to the strange and sincere, this collection offers something rare: the unfiltered emotional world of a woman who loved small things fiercely and wrote about them with complete sincerity.