This book was never just about winter—it was an entire ecosystem of longing. Familial knots tied and untied. The architecture of romantic love, how it builds rooms inside you then burns them down. Nature as witness, as mirror, as the thing that holds us when nothing else will.
I found summer hiding in the margins. Found love threaded through the white spaces between stanzas. Found myself—or versions of myself I'd forgotten, versions I'm still becoming—reflected back in someone else's careful arrangement of words.
Maybe that's what good poetry does: it leaves room for you to walk inside it. To see your own face in the water of someone else's grief, your own heartbeat in their line breaks. Parallels that aren't coincidence but recognition. The shock of reading a stranger's words and thinking yes, exactly that, I've lived that, I know that particular shade of ache.
Winter on the page. Summer in my chest. The poet's life and mine, overlapping like Venn diagrams of memory and longing, separate experiences that somehow touch in the middle, in that sacred space where all our human hurts and hungers meet.
 |
| A type of homage to two of my favorite things. |
My favorite poem from the collection:
