Singing Riptide Publication Day

Preorder before August 2025 at Press 53 and receive your copy early. Use the same link to order anytime thereafter.

Forgiveness. Self-worth. Unabashed joy. All this and more in my new book, Singing Riptide, out by Press 53 on Sept. 4, 2025. Over the last few years, I’ve charted my journey from personal, all-consuming shame; through the intergenerational forgiveness that made self-forgiveness possible; to self-realization and belonging. A companion to Anything That Happens—the collection that chronicles the root of my shame and how I navigated the immediate aftermath—Singing Riptide demonstrates the iterative process of moving forward after tragedy and the rewards of embracing uncertainty along the way.

What early readers are saying…
“There’s a crash in all of our lives, whether it is the result of bad choices or circumstances we don’t control. How we live through our hardships determines who we become. Cheryl Wilder’s Singing Riptide is a book for all who have fallen and all who have had the strength to get back up.” —Barbara Presnell, author of Otherwise, I’m Fine

“Singing Riptide is an intense book of memory and regret, but also a marvelous triumph in the fact that her poetry itself creates a way for both poet and reader of this rewarding book to discover what Ross Gay would also call ‘unabashed joy,’ and yes, redemption.”—Richard Jackson, author of Footprints: Poems