Cover art: Rosa Sophia Godshall, personal photograph of Miles

Book synopsis:

Many Miles is a meditation on grief, a love letter to a lost brother. Using automotive technology as an interpretive lens, Rosa Sophia Godshall reflects on childhood dysfunction and her own spiritual identity in search of a way forward. Threaded throughout this elegiac collection, unspoken but never far from her mind, is the question most often asked in the aftermath of suicide: Could I have saved him? The heartbreaking answer comes in a conversation with the medical examiner: “I never knew he wanted to die.”

Keywords:

Suicide, Griefwork, Grief, Loss, Family Dysfunction, Automotive Technology, Spirituality

Praise for Many Miles

Memory is more powerful than an “Earthquake-brand impact gun”: that’s one of the simpler lessons I learned from Rosa Sophia Godshall, who set aside her career as an auto mechanic to write this moving sequence for a brother lost to suicide. That tragic death endowed the author with a searing voice to memorialize the life they shared, growing up together amidst the threat of violence “that wound into my nightmares like the roots of the Virginia creeper vine…deep and hard to pull.” I wish more poetry was this harrowingly honest, this grease-stained, this dedicated to bearing witness to everyday lives and sorrows.

—Campbell McGrath

In Many Miles, Rosa Sophia writes, “We are machines, but we can find consciousness if we work hard enough.” This utterly unique and powerful trope connects these poems of elegy and resilience. Indeed, we are incredible machines with all our complicated emotional wiring, our pistons of love, all our fragile moving parts working in sync to propel us through life. And yes, we break down often, but hopefully we find a way to repair ourselves.

—Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of Homeland of My Body

Rosa Sophia Godshall’s work has been published in Philadelphia Stories Magazine, Sentience Literary Journal, SoFloPoJo, Islandia Journal, Thimble Literary Magazine, Limp Wrist, and others. She is also the author of Village of North Palm Beach: A History (The History Press, 2020). She was the recipient of the 2023 Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, through Florida International University. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a degree in automotive technology. She is also the managing editor of Mobile Electronics magazine, a publication for the aftermarket car audio industry. Rosa lives in Palm Bay, Florida, where she enjoys working on her 1960 Jeep CJ5, repairing typewriters and writing typewriter poetry on demand. Visit her website to learn more: www.torquesgarage.com