In Off to War, Daughter, readers will accompany Trapper Markelz as he looks back on the tenderness of early parenthood while reckoning with the uncertain world his children will someday inherit. Though rooted in a father’s experience raising his daughters, these poems reach far beyond parenthood itself, speaking to the joy and wonder that naturally accompany loving others deeply. Markelz captures the joy and wonder of caregiving alongside the fears, guilt, and self-doubt we rarely acknowledge.

—Anne Marie Wells, founder of The Joy of Poeting and author of Survived By: A Memoir in Verse + Other Poems.

Off to War, Daughter is a poignant ode to fatherhood, where tenderness and self-reckoning move alongside exquisite imagery. Markelz writes the wish “to be what lifts her up” against the ache of “running out of opportunities to save her,” ushering his daughter forward as “the best of Tudor, / Douglas, Adams, Joan of Arc,” untamable, radiant. Universal to any parent—or anyone who has loved a small, beautiful thing meant to leave—these poems ask to be carried and returned to like any book you’d never leave “outside in the rain.”

–Candice M. Kelsey, author of Another Place Altogether

Off to War, Daughter is a beautiful tribute to fatherhood and raising three daughters, while skirting the fragile boundary between love and impermanence. After Childproof Sky, written after the loss of a child to SIDS, this second collection turns toward what follows. “This is the very thing I was afraid of,” Markelz writes in “By One of the Two,” “how to secure this container of magic.” Written with lyrical precision, the poems move through moments that linger and instruct quietly. Rooted in everyday life—clothing, routines, small exchanges—these poems keep close to what might otherwise be missed. In “There Is Fire,” he writes of one daughter, “I’m watching her grow up./ Right now. By this water,/ releasing lanterns/ like I release her/ –into the water,/ the wind,/ the dark,/ the flame.”

–Susan Michele Coronel, author of In the Needle, A Woman (Winner, 2024 Donna Wolf Palacio Prize)