The Spine of My Soul is a deeply personal poetry collection that looks at a life through three broad lenses: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Across 104 poems, the collection moves through family, marriage, friendship, childhood memories, aging, grief, illness, abuse, betrayal, fear, and survival. That structure gives the book an emotional progression. The early poems spend time with grandchildren, longtime love, friendship, nature, childhood summers, and the ordinary moments that make a life feel full. As the collection moves into its “Bad” and “Ugly” sections, the material becomes increasingly intimate, confronting cancer, dementia, domestic violence, sexual assault, suicide, trauma, and the lasting effects of childhood abuse. The prologue prepares the reader for exactly this journey, describing a life in which people “live, fall, rise, and learn,” with survival happening breath by breath.

I think what gives the collection its personality is the way the same images keep returning in different emotional forms. Light can be comfort, hope, memory, or simply proof that another day has arrived. Storms become fear, illness, anger, and uncertainty. Rivers, tides, flowers, roots, scars, doors, houses, and changing seasons appear again and again, creating a vocabulary for experiences that are sometimes difficult to name directly. The title poem captures the purpose of the collection especially well. The speaker imagines her ribs as pages and her breaths as lines, turning wounds and long-held secrets into something another person can recognize. She describes the book as an open door for someone who believes they’re fighting alone, which feels like the clearest statement of what the collection wants to accomplish.

The poems use accessible language, strong rhyme, and familiar imagery, giving the collection the feeling of someone telling you her story. Some of the most affecting pieces become powerful through concrete details: an empty chair altered by grief, a woman changing the locks after violence, someone counting a sick husband’s breaths through the night, or a child learning to recognize danger from the atmosphere inside a home. The repeated vocabulary of storms, darkness, scars, light, and rising makes many poems feel deliberately connected, almost like variations on the same emotional language. At times that repetition makes the poems blend together in rhythm and imagery, but it also reinforces the collection’s central idea that healing rarely happens once. The same memories return, get reconsidered, and acquire different meanings as a person grows older.

I’d recommend The Spine of My Soul to people who value emotionally direct poetry and who have lived through grief, complicated family relationships, illness, abuse, caregiving, or the long process of rebuilding a sense of self. It could also resonate with people who support someone carrying those experiences, because several poems pay close attention to the value of listening, staying present, and allowing another person to reclaim their own voice. The final poem, “Unlearning the Script,” is a fitting destination for the collection because it ends with the speaker actively replacing old rules about perfection, silence, appearance, and pleasing others with a kinder understanding of her own worth. She isn’t simply remembering what happened to her. She’s deciding what gets to shape her now. That makes The Spine of My Soul feel like a record of reclamation, written by someone looking directly at what formed her and choosing, poem by poem, what she wants to carry forward.