Poet Writes On Grief, Nature And Hurricane Helene In New Book

This conversation originally aired in the Aug. 24, 2025 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Seven years ago, poet Michael Hettich landed in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Since moving there, Hettich has published four books of poetry, including his latest, A Sharper Silence. The book explores nature, touches on Hurricane Helene and speaks of his relationship with his wife, Colleen, who died in January of lung cancer.

Inside Appalachia Producer Bill Lynch spoke with Hettich about the collection.

The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.

Lynch: Would you like to read something?

Hettich: Certainly, I’d like to read a poem called “Delicate bones.”

She called to say there was a snake in our bedroom, 

Nothing to be scared of, just a little guy.

She said, I should come home and see it before 

it slipped into a closet or under the floorboards.

It looked harmless, she said, and very beautiful.

When she texted pictures, I couldn’t help noticing

the bulge halfway down the snake’s body, a mouse 

or even a chipmunk, and indeed

the snake was a beauty. Then she said it had slipped away 

already. I hope it’s not hiding in a drawer 

or the dirty clothes hamper. I told her, I’m sure,

my brother had a boa constrictor as a boy.

My mother helped him feed it once a month 

with laboratory rats she got from the cancer 

research center in town.

It took a whole month for the lump in the snake 

to move from the front to the back, then out.

By then, just delicate bones, scrubbed clean.

My brother watched that snake while he lay in his bed 

recovering from cancer.

He’d been stitched up along the back of his head, 

a bit like those test rats. The thread was black 

and the stitches looked sloppy, like a badly mended baseball.

I remember how wide the snake opened its mouth 

as the dazed rat just seemed to walk in.

Lynch: That’s interesting. So why did you choose that poem? 

Hettich: Well, I chose it because I think when one is first becoming acquainted with a poet’s work, it’s often good to start with a more accessible of that poet’s poems, and its images are readily available. You know, they’re quite striking, I think. I just feel like it’s a good one to start with. And I think the ending image, at least to me, is a strong one. And it’s not just a strong one for the poem itself, but I think it’s a strong one for the book. 

Lynch: Talk about the book a little bit. 

Hettich: In 2023, my wife was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, and so this book, which is called A Sharper Silence, was written during the two years she was surviving the stage four lung cancer. So, all the poems in the book are about the experience of two people who love each other and have loved each other for a long time, facing the end of one of those two people’s lives. 

And I wasn’t going to publish it, but then a friend of mine said, “Why don’t you try sending it to … Terrapin Books,” and I did. That’s where this book came from. 

Lynch: You’ve lived several places. You know, the very different locations that you’ve experienced everything: New York, Vermont, Colorado, Florida. Does place play into your poetry, into your work? 

Hettich: Absolutely. Every aspect of my poems, I think, employ place in, you know, the flora, fauna, light and trees and flowers of those various places. 

In fact, I’ve thought in the past sometimes that one reason I never really use New York, for example, except in poems about family … of course, I write about family, too, but, place doesn’t really enter into my memory when I think of New York. I think there was a certain familiarity to the place. Having grown up there, it made the sort of striking images that wake one up and bring a poem to the fore, at least for me, it doesn’t really happen there. 

And you know, one of the things about Miami was it was always such a strikingly surprising place, you know, that I couldn’t help walking out in my yard and seeing something that elicited something that ended up being a poem. I would say place is central to me. And sometimes, people have called me a nature poet, which I don’t think I am at all, but I think I would say I’m a poet of place, and a poet that has written about and drawn from many different places that I have inhabited. 

Lynch: What’s your perspective like where you live now? 

Hettich: Ah, beautiful. I love it here. It’s not only the land and the landscape and the rivers and the vividness of everything that’s growing around me all the time. And that’s another thing; I just got back from Santa Fe. And in the two weeks I was in Santa Fe, my whole garden, everything is growing around my house. It grew by two feet, and I had to get out there and pull out all the weeds. 

And it was only two weeks ago that I left. 

So, that stuff is amazing to me. 

I love the fact that we have bears coming across our property all the time. To my mind, they’re wild. So, I love watching them, and and just being quiet around them. 

But I also love the culture here. I love the people more than any other place I’ve ever lived. The people are open in a way that is, I don’t know how to say it, you know, just beautiful, and I welcome it. 

We’re in a very wounded landscape now from Hurricane Helene and one of the things that happened during Hurricane Helene was my house. My wife was not doing well. Then late September came and people helped us, people we didn’t even know helped us.  

We had to leave our house for five weeks and go stay with friends, actually friends we didn’t even know before the hurricane. We stayed in their house for five weeks. 

I mean, they were generous and gracious to us the entire time. Something just moves my heart so deeply. And people came to our property and cleaned it up for us and helped us in so many unprecedented and unpredictable ways. You know, I’m so grateful.

Lynch: The new book obviously deals with a very difficult time in your life. Where are you with your writing? 

Hettich: Now, that’s a great question. Thank you for that. Well, when Colleen, my wife, died, what I really turned to was writing and writing poems, because that’s what I’ve done my whole life. Really, I wrote a 50 or so page poem in sections, not just a continuous poem, but I wrote every day. 

Just for the first three weeks or so, I just got up in the morning and just worked on memories and feelings and all sorts of things that were coming up, coming to me then, and I just wrote these poems. 

I ended up writing a whole book of poems. And I’m actually not going to do what I normally do, which would be go back over and revise and revise and revise until they’re “good poems” or “finished poems.” I’m just going to keep the manuscript as it was, as it is, and perhaps publish it, perhaps not. But that is the main thing I did, in terms of writing. 

After she passed away, and I’m always working on writing, I get up every day and work on writing. It’s not that it gives you solace, but it gives you, in a sense, something to do, someplace to go. You know, when everything has been sort of, I guess, ripped away. 

So, I’m very grateful to the fact that I discovered poetry as a young guy, and I’ve just been working on it for my entire life. It’s almost as though that’s the gift that it gave me. I have this time of I’m not sure of solace, I guess, in the work, however good it is. 

You know, it might not be good. It might be terrible. That doesn’t really matter to me. 

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A Sharper Silence is available through Terrapin Books.