In This Side of Water, Maureen Pilkington’s bright debut collection, precise and vivid language delivers flawed characters to their moments of reckoning. A married woman goes to the cemetery to resurrect her father; a young girl at a beach club witnesses her parents’ infidelity; an icy New Year’s Eve leads a devoted husband to violent clarity; a teenager spies on her mother and a Catholic priest; a Russian “dancer” visits her American husband and plays a dangerous game. In these sixteen stories, the backdrop of water—the Long Island Sound, the sulfur polluted Monangahela River, a koi pond, a basin of holy water, a tear in a boy’s eye—provides a salve for these characters, ferrying them to personal ports of renewal and resolution.

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About the Authors: 

Maureen Pilkington has always been writing. After working in book publishing in New York City as a subsidiary rights director, Pilkington received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Since then her fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, journals and anthologies.

She is the founder and director of Page Turners, a program that places authors in the inner city schools of Manhattan to teach writing, under the Archdiocese of New York’s Inner City Scholarship Fund.

Pilkington is an avid kayaker, cook and traveler.  Currently, she is working on a novel that begins in a Catholic girls’ boarding school. She divides her time between Rye, New York and Manhattan.

“This is a poet unafraid of being understood, who will not hide behind decorativeness or the oblique. Read these poems aloud and you will hear an authentic and quintessentially American voice not only writing but also speaking to you.” Thomas Lux

“I take guilty pleasure in the poems of Kevin Pilkington, and consider him an essential voice in contemporary poetry.” Jay Parini

“In this rich collection of tender poems, he celebrates the small consolations of daily life that offer spiritual relief in the face of disappointment and loss. There are no easy epiphanies here-just one poet working as hard as he can to get through daily life with dignity and grace.” Jim Daniels.

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Kevin Pilkington is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.  He is the author of nine collections: Spare Change was the La Jolla Poets Press National Book Award winner; Getting By won the Ledge chapbook award; In the Eyes of a Dog received the New York Book Festival Award; The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree was a Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award finalist.  His poetry has appeared in many anthologies including: Birthday Poems: A Celebration, Western Wind, and Contemporary Poetry of New England.  Over the years, he has been nominated for four Pushcarts.  His poems have appeared in numerous magazines including: The Harvard Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Yankee, Hayden’s Ferry, Columbia, North American Review, etc.  He has taught and lectured at numerous colleges and universities including The New School, Manhattanville College, MIT, University of Michigan, Susquehanna University, Georgia Tech. His debut novel Summer Shares was published in 2012 and a paperback edition was reissued in summer 2014. His collection Where You Want To Be: New and Selected Poems was a 2017 IPPY Award Winner. He completed a second novel and is working on a new collection of poems.