No Unpaid Passengers is an emotionally riveting collection of poems written by author Pam R. Johnson Davis. The collection is organized into six sections: I: Unpaid Pain, II: The Next Stop, III: Alone on the Night Train, IV: Love on the Ride, V: End of the Line, and VI: Afterword: Anybody Can Write a Poem (Or How Rejection Turned into a TED Talk). Serious themes such as racism, assault, divorce, and religion intermingle with themes of love, friendship, joy, home, and beauty to take readers on an incredibly raw and relatable journey.

Author Pam Johnson Davis does an incredible job of telling a story that touches everyone in some way. Davis plays into expectations with her use of slang and familiar language, using those devices to bring to life personal experiences and paint clear pictures of real-life situations that readers can relate to. Through those grounding narratives, Davis can so effectively tackle less tangible themes of love, loss, betrayal, grief, hope, and joy. Through her own experiences with marriage and divorce, Davis leads readers to question their ideas of relationships, commitment, and love. Through her experiences as a black person, a woman, and a member of the church, Davis brings up ideas about religion, trauma, sexism, racism, determination, optimism, and acceptance, both of self and others. Following this pattern, No Unpaid Passengers is able to operate as a book of revelation, showing readers the pervasive connectivity of the human experience: what you go through, someone else has gone through, and what you feel, someone else has felt.

I highly recommend this collection of raw beauty and vulnerability, in which Davis depicts her experiences. She writes not as an individual but as a representative of the human experience, providing an opportunity to connect both with the unfamiliar outside of ourselves and that which hides within.

No Unpaid Passengers is an emotional collection of poetry that takes readers on a journey through human experiences in a way that will stay with them long after they put the book down. These poems will leave readers feeling everything from one end of the spectrum to the other, a true representation of life, the joys, and the sorrows.

Pages: 90 | ASIN : B0BC5NXXXS