Lois Roma-Deeley's sixth full-length poetry collection Waiting for the Mercy Ship was published from Broadstone Books in 2025. Her poems can be found in numerous journals and anthologies in including Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day Series, Villanelles, (Everyman Library Pocket Poetry Series, Random House), The Bellingham Review, North Dakota Quarterly, South Florida Poetry Journal, Quiddity International Literary Journal and many more. Roma-Deeley was named the Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow in 2024. In 2012, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement and Case selected her as Professor of the Year, Community College. Currently, Roma-Deely is Associate Editor of the poetry journal Presence. She serves as Poet Laureate of Scottsdale, Arizona.

Other poems on the web by Lois Roma-Deeley:
Four poems
"For the Last Time Body Explains Dissociation"

Lois Roma-Deeley's Website.

About Waiting for the Mercy Ship:

"Waiting for the Mercy Ship is a brave, generous, and necessary collection of poems that opens its whole heart to allow readers insight into the grueling aftermath of loss. While the book is centered around grief, it is also grounded in love, faith, family, wonder, perseverance, and strength. In 'True Story,' Lois Roma-Deeley promises her 'Sweet Boy,' 'I will inscribe every day, every hour and all the minutes/ you have been loved.' And in the book's final poem, 'The Last,' she summons the resolve to go on, saying 'it's for me to decide how I might live without/ conclusions. . . ./the last words I will ever utter/ are not written here.' This is a book that no one would ever want to write, but that everyone should read. In short, Waiting for the Mercy Ship is a gift to us all. I hope that it finds its way into the hands and hearts that need it, that ache to feel even the slightest breeze of mercy that might let them know they're not alone."
—Daniel Donaghy

"Waiting for the Mercy Ship is a book of intense beauty and lyrical clarity, a revelation—not out of grief but into a celebration, a chronicle. Reading Roma-Deeley is a study in tenderness and beauty. Her meticulous orchestration of emotion and language in this stunning collection ensures that one hears precisely what is intended. It is heartbreaking, loving, sad, and gorgeous. If 'we hold' this book, then we grasp 'a harvest of revelations' and 'starflowers.' Roma-Deeley writes that 'our past is a wish cut into hard stone,' but so is the enduring beauty of what she has written—only here is not a wish; here is a thing of enduring material and essential beauty."
—Saddiq Dzukogi

"Lois Roma-Deeley writes, in Waiting for the Mercy Ship, from grief's 'weary journey of what-ifs' after a loved one's suicide. Heart-wrenching but moving against the current toward hope, these stunning poems 'sing into the shadows of too much sorrow.' Masterfully, the poet punctuates the collection with letters to 'Sweet Boy' and well-meaning friends. Throughout, the word if is pivotal—'If I were brave,' 'If Wisdom Could Be Dug Out of the Desert Earth,' 'If we forget / the language of the earth,' 'If healing has a starting point, / where does it begin?' But Lois Roma-Deeley ultimately is brave, wise, and able to capture the seemingly unsayable. Waiting for the Mercy Ship offers healing in honest questions, lyric laments, and unconditional embrace of family. For those grieving and those trying to help, each poem is a life raft."
—Marjorie Maddox