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.”
Harbor Editions, March 2025 – Buy it Here
Praise for Many Miles
Rosa Sophia’s Many Miles skillfully employs the concept of literary vehicles—the components of metaphor—with actual vehicles, i.e. cars. This auto mechanic/poet, grounded in Robert Frost’s famous poem, writes a stunning series about her brother Miles. Miles—a unit of measure, a way to sum up a journey—is also, more importantly, a beloved sibling now gone. Many Miles is a tender and gorgeous chapbook. –Denise Duhamel, author of Kinky
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
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, author of Florida Poems and Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition
“Where do the fissures stop? How much of my inheritance is what I am destined to become?” the speaker in Rosa Sophia’s Many Miles asks. Like the poet herself, this speaker is a seeker. She is also an auto mechanic and a grieving sister, reckoning with her brother’s suicide. As she mines the lexicon of vehicular maintenance and repair, Sophia constructs a series of transcendent elegies at once idiosyncratic and universal. ‘You can understand that—can’t you?’ the speaker asks. Every reader nods their head. This debut collection revs and purrs, powered by the dual engines of grace and craft. –Julie Marie Wade, author of Skirted