I Will (Not) Take You Back

Before it was a book, it was my crumpled napkins, receipts and ink-stained notebooks. Fragments of feelings and paper, puzzle-pieced together and called a story. This is not a love story. It is an exploration and expulsion of everything a girl spent so long being taught to contain. Grief, shame, self-hatred, confusion, resentment and the complicated art of letting go. Told in three parts, You, Us and Me, these poems are sometimes cruel, sometimes forgiving and often contradictory. Above all, this is not about the person who left. It is about the person who remained. And this time, the afterthought gets the last word.