The Most Expensive Thing I Ever Owned Was Hope
Hope can keep us alive. It can also keep us negotiating with what has already answered.
The writer behind Unburied Eulogies
Amy
Steinhauser.
A poet writing where grief, attachment, identity, survival, and human behavior meet.
Not from above it
I write from somewhere inside the machinery.
Amy Steinhauser is the writer and creator behind Unburied Eulogies™, a body of poetry and prose about grief, love, trauma, attachment, identity, survival, and the strange work of becoming ourselves after life has changed the terms.
Her writing lives where poetry and human behavior meet: in the things we do to survive love, loss, longing, shame, memory, and ourselves.
The life beneath the language
Survival left a vocabulary.
She is queer and a single mother by choice raising three surviving quadruplets. Her fourth child, Delaney, died three days after their premature birth in 2013. Since then, her life has also held the death of her mother, ovarian cancer, relationship rupture, and the long, nonlinear work of mental health recovery.
She has rebuilt without pretending any of it made her wiser on schedule.
Amy has known crisis from both sides of the room. She spent years working on a mobile crisis intervention unit, responding to people experiencing severe psychological distress. Her understanding of survival was also shaped by the difficult, unglamorous work of her own therapy, including multiple rounds of DBT.
Together, those experiences form the psychological undercurrent of her writing: not clinical distance, but lived proximity. Not a lesson delivered after the wound, but language made from inside it.
Selected work
Begin with the doors already open.
Beyond the archive
The story before Unburied.
In 2017, Amy told the story of becoming a single mother by choice, delivering quadruplets at 25 weeks, losing Delaney, and raising Camden, Sadie, and Sydney in Women’s Health.
Read the published feature ↗The Unburied Letter
Come closer.
This is a quieter place for us. I’ll share new writing, the stories beneath the lines, and the thoughts that need more room than a post can hold.
Find the living archive
Stay near the work.
New poems, excavations, and sentences from inside the machinery.