The Kingdom Where No One Dies

The Kingdom Where No One Dies is a deeply textured and emotionally resonant poetry collection that explores memory, loss, family, and the enduring tension between rootedness and impermanence. Structured in three parts, the manuscript moves with grace and subtle force through personal history, rural landscapes, and shifting states of mind. From the fields of a family farm to the quiet griefs of parenthood and aging, the collection renders the particulars of lived experience with precision, warmth, and an unflinching honesty.

The poems often inhabit transitional spaces-leaving for college, moving houses, watching children grow, bearing witness to the slow dissolution of elders and traditions. They carry a strong sense of place-Vermont’s fields and back roads, barns and schoolrooms-but also evoke the psychic terrain of those navigating the passing of time and the breaking of long-held familial structures. Voices from past and present-sons, fathers, teachers, musicians, old lovers, and lost friends-interweave to form a choral meditation on intimacy, failure, and persistence.

This is a collection that honors the ache and beauty of ordinary life. It neither romanticizes nor diminishes rural or working-class experience, but instead gives it full voice-imbued with dignity, complexity, and the accumulated weight of memory. The Kingdom Where No One Dies is a moving debut from a poet who writes with both wisdom and vulnerability, attentive to the small, luminous details that mark a life and the silences that follow.

Author Biography

Jeff McRae was born and raised in Vermont and makes his home there with his wife and three children. He earned a Masters in Writing from the University of New Hampshire and a Masters in Fine Arts in Poetry from Washington University, St. Louis where he was the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize. Since graduating he has worked as a bagel baker, a fly rod builder, a digital copywriter, an youth employment specialist, and for fifteen years as a literature and creative writing instructor where he was recognized as the Adjunct Professor of the Year. He has also volunteered his time as a poetry reader for Boulevard Magazine and The Adroit Journal. With poetry, music has been a life-long constant. A member of the local musician’s union, he has worked as a drummer in theaters, clubs, and coffee houses throughout New England in a variety of rock, trad jazz, big band, bluegrass, and country bands as well as regularly performing in pit bands for summer stock and seasonal productions.