"The New Life" explores motherhood through the lens of a fractured childhood and intergenerational loss and trauma. Stories of loss return throughout the book: a grandmother’s stillbirth, a child lost on the boat from Russia to the U.S., friends’ miscarriages and child losses. There are poems written in the wake of 9/11 and Sandy Hook. Throughout the manuscript, we see the speaker wrestling with the turmoil of raising children in a volatile, violent world.