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Healing Powers of Poetry
How I Understand It is a blend of poetry, memoir, therapy-informed reflection, and guided self-inquiry. Did you write these poems with a specific audience in mind, or was it a more personal endeavor?
Writing poetry–especially what I call Bad Poetry is always a personal endeavor, near and dear to my heart and my experiences. Because of this, taking my poems public has been a very vulnerable exercise. It is perhaps because this book has been the most vulnerable project I have engaged in that it has also produced the most delight and been one of the most rewarding experiences.
When I first started writing, I was writing specifically for an audience of one: my young daughter. I felt compelled to transmit information, my hard-earned wisdom, my therapeutic insights, to her in a way that would be accessible, engaging, and informative. I wanted to make a reference tool that she could return to throughout her life, one that would be a source of comfort and guidance if I could not be there in person. (I wanted to make not just something that she could refer to, but something that she would want to refer to.) I wanted her to know me, what I wish for her, and what I have learned about resilience that would be useful to her in different phases of her life. To my surprise, once I started writing, I found that poetry was the best vehicle for this project. The poems that became the core content of the collection poured out of me, one after the other. In writing for my daughter, I found myself all over again, and eventually realized that I was writing as much for me as I was for her. Once I finished writing the collection of poetry, the experience was so profoundly moving that I knew I wanted to extend the project further and bring it to a wider audience.
I started writing the book as a mother doing a very private project. But, as a therapist, I knew that the content of the collection would appeal to a wider audience. I’ve worked with enough clients to know that the topics covered in the book are topics everyone ponders. Bad Poetry is something everyone can do and benefit from. Bad Poetry helps us connect to ourselves and others in meaningful ways. Bad poetry helps us discover the strength within our vulnerabilities. Moving forward with publication was, in a sense, an embodiment of the Bad Poetry ethos.
In my profession, I have taught and experienced creative writing and particularly the healing powers of poetry. There is something magical that happens when we take important information, condense it, and infuse it with layers of emotion, with pieces of ourselves. Our ability to gain insight into ourselves grows. Our ability to engage in perspective-taking increases. Our resilience improves. And- who wouldn’t want that? This poetry collection is for everyone.
The book draws from your experiences as a therapist, mother, former spouse, and individual navigating life’s challenges. How did you balance personal vulnerability with professional insight?
I’ve always been a practical person. And, to me, poetry became appealing when I started to understand its practical applications and specifically how I could use it as a tool for self-improvement, insight, and growth. It is much easier for me to be vulnerable if I understand why I’m doing it and that my vulnerability is serving a purpose worth pursuing. The private matters I discuss in the book, I do so with intentionality and purpose.
Additionally, my book is all about how I understand my experiences and life. I don’t know that I can separate my understanding of my experiences from my professional insights because my profession has informed me and shaped me profoundly. Becoming a therapist has given me the language to talk about my experiences in a way that I find deeply satisfying.
What misconceptions about healing do you encounter most often?
So many that it is hard to list!
I will say this: More often than not, healing requires us to confront pain, hold it, and metabolize it.
Many people believe that they cannot handle pain. That to confront the emotional pain would be too life-threatening. It is, in fact, more life-threatening to avoid your own emotions and pain. It leads to so much disconnection, suffering, and stagnation- much more so than if you took the initiative to confront, hold and metabolize it.
If you are anything like I once was, and thought that poetry was a frivolous, self-indulgent luxury, I have news. Bad Poetry is a way to take the initiative and gently metabolize pain, at your own pace. And it works!
What do you hope readers take away from the sections dealing with relationships and codependency?
Hope!
Everyone wants love, to have it, to give it… Humans are wired for connection. We just can’t help ourselves. Relationships are wonderful. Connections and especially romantic connections are ways that we learn more about ourselves, and they are how we learn how to give and receive love. Difficulties in relationships, such as codependency issues, are invitations to examine our relationship with ourselves and erroneous conceptions that we might have about what constitutes love. It is worth the effort to fully be present for your relationships, to listen to your emotions… It makes space for real love to grow.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Facebook | Website | Amazon
How I Understand It is a candid, unconventional collection of poems, reflections, and clinical insights from a therapist who isn’t afraid to call out codependency, detail the emotional complexities of grief, or tell imposter syndrome to go f*ck itself. Each chapter explores a universal theme-love, divorce, dating, trauma, forgiveness, grief, motivation-blending raw poetry with therapeutic commentary and journaling prompts that invite readers into their own journey of insight and growth. The book culminates with a guide on how to build your own collection of poetry for resilience, making it a practical therapy tool for anybody looking to upgrade their self-expression repertoire.
Whether you’re a therapy client, a clinician, or a human navigating the tender terrain of adulthood, this book is here to remind you: your emotions make sense, your perspective is valid, and your story is still being written.
This is not your average poetry book.
This is not your average self-help book.
This is How I Understand It.
How I Understand It
How I Understand It: A Bad Poet’s Guide to Mental Health & Resilience is a deeply personal blend of poetry, memoir, therapy-informed reflection, and guided self-inquiry. Author Margaret Bryden writes from the overlapping places of therapist, mother, former spouse, wounded person, and stubbornly hopeful human being, moving through love, belonging, divorce, pregnancy, aging, trauma, grief, parenting, imperfection, and creative resilience. The book’s central idea is simple but surprisingly fertile: “bad poetry” can be a brave, playful way to tell the truth, make sense of pain, and build a more compassionate relationship with yourself.
I appreciated the book’s refusal to act polished in the ways books about healing often do. Bryden’s voice can be funny, blunt, tender, profane, and oddly ceremonial, sometimes all within the same page. I found that tonal looseness disarming. A poem like “Making Love Alone,” with its cookie, its solitude, and its sweet redefinition of intimacy, captures the book at its best: warm, strange, embodied, and quietly radical. I also liked the way Bryden keeps returning to personal responsibility without turning it into punishment. In poems about boundaries, codependency, and divorce, she doesn’t soften the bruises, but she also doesn’t linger in helplessness. The writing is not traditionally elegant all the time, and it doesn’t seem to want to be. Its charm is more ragged than refined, more alive than sculpted.
The ideas in the book stayed with me because they’re grounded in emotional reality rather than neat self-help slogans. Bryden’s treatment of grief, especially the long case-study sequence on grief avoidance, is messy and uncomfortable in a way that feels honest. Her reflections on pregnancy and motherhood are just as affecting, particularly when the body becomes both a site of wonder and bewilderment. I was moved by how often the book turns toward paradox: selfishness as a path to deeper love, boundaries as a way of drawing the right people closer, success as boring and humble, and death as a reason to live more fully. There’s a real pulse here, a sense that the author has earned her insights by walking through the smoke herself.
By the end, I felt that How I Understand It is less concerned with being a perfect poetry collection than with becoming a companion for people trying to hear themselves clearly. Its ending, especially the defiant tenderness of “Imposter Syndrome Can Go Fuck Itself” and the practical invitation to make one’s own poems of resilience, gives the book a satisfying sense of arrival. This is a heartfelt and emotionally generous book. I’d recommend it to readers who like therapy-adjacent writing, reflective poetry, journaling, and books that speak plainly about love, grief, trauma, and the difficult art of becoming kinder to yourself.
Pages: 234 | ASIN : B0H2FPMTS9
Maintaining My Personal Voice
Moondust is a collection of poems whose themes range from reflections on nature and childhood memory to grief, love, and mental anguish. Why was this an important collection for you to share with readers?
Moondust is a journey through emotions and experiences that are often hard to put into words. It’s a way for me to explore and process my own feelings while hopefully offering comfort and insight to others. In my nature poems, I often find beauty in the simplest moments—like witnessing the dawn sky or observing the birds in my garden—and I want to preserve those vivid snapshots.
Why did Moondust feel like the right title for this body of work?
“Moondust” symbolizes the beauty and inherent fragility of life’s transient moments. It reflects a sense of wonder at the natural world and how its sights and sounds, and the people within it, can stir profound emotions within us.
Childhood and family memory appear with both warmth and ache throughout the book. Was revisiting those spaces emotionally difficult during the writing process?
No. I look back on my childhood fondly. Each space holds a story that shaped who I am today, and while there were challenges, the overall experience was filled with love. It was more of a celebration than a struggle, and I was grateful for the opportunity to honor that part of my life through my writing.
Are there themes or forms you’re eager to explore in future collections?
I continually grow as a writer, exploring new styles while maintaining my personal voice. Free verse gives me the freedom to express myself without the constraints of rhyme. I also enjoy writing haiku because I love capturing a single beautiful moment in a brief, impactful snapshot.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Website | Amazon
Her deep appreciation for the natural world shines through, revealing its unique quirks and challenges through lyrical expression.
With her distinctive voice, Steele explores emotions, relationships, and personal truths.
Each poem is a powerful piece of artful storytelling, appealing to anyone seeking connection and insight.
Foundation of My Healing
Unleashing the Power Within is a short, heartfelt collection of inspirational poems that moves through self-worth, recovery, faith, gratitude, nature, and personal renewal. Did you write these pieces as you were going through those moments, or after gaining distance from them?
For Unleashing the Power Within, I began writing these pieces in 2023, after my first book, Inspiring Book of Poems, Dreams and Stories, was published. While many of the experiences come from a past shaped by a toxic upbringing, the writing itself was very much alive in the present moment.
I was reflecting on current emotions, ongoing growth, and the lessons I had carried forward. In that sense, the poems were written from both a place of healing and awareness—looking back, while still living and feeling deeply in the now.
More than anything, this book became a way for me to continue my story, not just for myself, but to empower others who may be walking a similar path.
Faith plays a central role in the later emotional arc of the book. How did your spiritual perspective shape the way you approached recovery?
I have always trusted in God, even in the middle of chaos. Growing up without knowing my father and experiencing abuse from my stepfather led me to realize that the only father I could truly rely on was God.
That understanding became the foundation of my healing. Believing that God had a plan for my life gave me hope, even in the hardest moments. It reminded me that my story wasn’t over and that I wasn’t alone in what I was facing.
My faith shaped the way I approached recovery by helping me hold on, trust the process, and believe that freedom, healing, and purpose were still possible for me.
Your nature imagery—cedar trees, ocean, birds—brings a quieter energy to the collection. What draws you to those images?
Nature has always been a place where I feel deeply connected—both to my surroundings and to myself. When I’m outside, whether I’m hiking or simply sitting still, I take in what I see, feel, and hear, and that often becomes part of my writing.
I love the smell of fresh cedar, the sound of wind chimes, and watching birds, especially the golden finches that visit my yard. I have a bird feeder and bird bath, and those quiet moments—like seeing them in the rain—stay with me. They inspire both reflection and peace.
My poem about the Gulf of Mexico came from a very personal experience. It was my first time standing on the sand in Florida, looking out at the ocean and taking in something so vast and beautiful. That moment stayed with me in a powerful way.
Growing up in a more sheltered environment gave me a deeper appreciation for the world around me. Even as a child, I loved being outside whenever I could. Now, I notice everything more intentionally. Nature gives me space to reflect, to feel, and to breathe—and that quieter energy naturally finds its way into my poetry.
This book often feels like it’s speaking directly to someone who is struggling. Who did you imagine you were writing for?
I was writing to myself, and to anyone who has gone through or is still going through what I’ve experienced. Many of these poems came from moments where I needed comfort, encouragement, and a reminder that I could keep going.
At the same time, I was thinking about others who might be struggling in similar ways—people who feel unseen, overwhelmed, or unsure of their worth. I wanted the words to feel personal, like they were speaking directly to them.
If someone reads my work and feels even a little less alone, a little more understood, or finds the strength to keep moving forward, then I’ve written it for them too.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Unleashing The Power Within: A Journey of Self-Discovery Through Poetry is a deeply personal, faith-filled collection for the moments that change you. The ones that shake you, stretch you, and slowly rebuild you.
These pieces give voice to what often goes unspoken. The silent battles. The long nights. The strength it takes to keep going when everything feels heavy.
Rooted in themes of healing, faith, and transformation, this collection gently guides you toward rediscovering your inner strength and purpose.
Inside this collection, you will find:
Strength through pain and personal struggle
Healing through faith and reflection
The courage to set healthy boundaries
Clarity in uncertain seasons
The confidence that has always been within you
Healing is not always a straight path. It can feel slow. Messy. Uncertain. But even then, something inside you is still shifting. Little by little, you do not just survive what broke you; you begin to live again.
If this speaks to your heart, this may be exactly what you need right now.
More Other Such Matters
Fella Cederbaum’s More Other Such Matters is a book of spiritually searching poems that circle around identity, love, mortality, truth, and the terrible persistence of the thinking mind. The collection moves less like a narrative than like a sustained act of inquiry, each poem worrying at the same great questions from a different angle until they start to glow. Again and again, Cederbaum turns to direct address and cascading questions, asking what remains when profession, doctrine, self-image, fear, and even opinion fall away. Poems like “Before You Were You,” “Faith,” “The Knower And The Known,” and “The Mirror” make the book feel like both a meditation manual and a private reckoning, though its strongest moments are more intimate and embodied than abstract.
What struck me most was the book’s unusual combination of severity and tenderness. Cederbaum can sound almost admonishing, as if she’s trying to shake the reader awake, but there’s warmth under that urgency, and often a real ache. I felt that most sharply in poems where the philosophical pressure gives way to something bruised and personal, like the old tears in “Love Broke Through,” the lonely vastness of “One Single Tear,” or the quietly devastating recognition in “What I Thought I Wanted,” where imagined identities keep turning bland in the hand. Even the more playful poems, especially “My Universe of Cheese,” have that same undercurrent: delight laced with metaphysical impatience. I admired the refusal to settle for easy consolation. This isn’t poetry interested in decorating experience. It wants to strip experience bare.
The book is most effective when its style becomes genuinely musical. Cederbaum has a real instinct for repetition, for the pressure of a recurring phrase, for the way a question can become its own rhythm. Her best lines have lift and clarity, and her images can be surprisingly memorable, as with the orchid and the daisy, the cat as a silent teacher in “Medical Journeys,” or the mirror that keeps changing with praise, desire, and self-doubt until the poem lands on a wiser, steadier truth. The poems return often to oneness, surrender, and the unreliability of thought. But even then, the voice is unmistakably authentic.
I found More Other Such Matters earnest, searching, and often deeply affecting. It’s a book less interested in polish than in penetration, less interested in literary coyness than in saying the largest things as plainly as possible. I think readers drawn to spiritual poetry, contemplative writing, and emotionally candid meditations on selfhood, love, and impermanence will find a great deal here.
Pages: 156 | ASIN : B0FR37DNSZ
Water Your Flowers With Love: A Collection of Poems
Water Your Flowers With Love is a poetry collection that moves through grief, memory, exile, tenderness, and moral urgency without ever letting go of its faith in love as a sustaining force. Across poems about childhood, a lost father, immigration, war, kindness, and the consolations of the natural world, Author Koula Hadjitooulou keeps returning to one central conviction: the human spirit is fragile, but it isn’t finished. The book’s title poem crystallizes that vision by turning childhood harm into an aching plea for gentleness, while poems like “Cyprus and the Girl with the Water Jug,” “Warrior of Life,” and “Three Little Birds” widen the emotional field into displacement, survival, and the cost of violence borne by children.
What stayed with me most was the book’s emotional sincerity. This is not guarded poetry. Hadjitooulou writes as someone who means every line, and that directness gives the collection its pulse. The poems about her father especially landed hard for me. In “I Can Still Feel His Warmth” and “Letter to My Dad,” the grief isn’t abstract or ornamental. It feels authentic, almost tactile, as though memory itself were giving off heat. I also found myself moved by the recurring image-world of flowers, stars, hills, wind, and birds. In another writer’s hands, that language might feel overly sweet, but here it often works because it comes from a genuine instinct toward repair. Even when the book turns toward atrocity and abandonment, it keeps searching for what she calls “pockets of light,” and I admired that refusal to surrender to bitterness.
What I appreciated about the collection is also where I felt its limits. The writing is strongest when Hadjitooulou anchors her hopeful, exhortatory style in a specific story or image, as she does with the child carrying a water jug in a refugee camp, the young girl forced into marriage in “She Was Only Fifteen,” or the immigrant soul suspended between two worlds. In those pieces, the poems gather weight and texture. Elsewhere, the book leans on affirmation, repetition, and uplift. The ideas are earnest and relatable, sometimes beautifully so. What I felt was a writer trying, again and again, to make compassion usable. And in a collection so preoccupied with survival, resilience, and the moral necessity of tenderness, the insistence itself becomes part of the art.
Water Your Flowers With Love gave me the feeling that I had spent time with a voice shaped by hurt, gratitude, and an almost stubborn belief in mercy. I’d recommend it to readers who like accessible, heartfelt poetry, especially those drawn to poems about healing, family, displacement, inner strength, and the attempt to keep faith even when the world makes that difficult.
Pages: 160 | ASIN : B0G4F2K2TC
God’s Saving Grace
Bethesda is a collection of poems that moves through faith, pain, identity, womanhood, and longing with a voice that is raw and unguarded. What inspired you to write this particular collection of poems?
I would have to say that my inspiration came from Christ and the state of the Church. I remember watching someone preach online and the topic of the sermon was John 5: 1-12 in the Bible. As I watched, the name “Bethesda” came to me, and it was in these moments that I knew the title/subject matter of a new collection would be Bethesda. This was back in 2021, and the work was about 4 years in the making. At the time before seeing the sermon, I had been experiencing a dry season and hit a bit of a writer’s block. When the concept for the new work came, the inspiration to write set in, and the drought lifted. Along the way, life happened, and the writing stopped for a little while. There was, however, a time in 2024 when revisiting the work that I had done, and this is when I decided to follow through on compiling the pieces, writing two-thirds of the work to completion. Looking back, I understand that it took me that long to live through the questions I had been carrying. It took time to build the resolve to have the confidence to be honest and forthcoming in the pieces.
I was also inspired by my heroes – those that I know in real life, like my mother, my father, my siblings, my elder cousin, and members of my church community. I was inspired by how they handled pain, discouragement, stagnation, and defeat. Using my own observations about how these folks managed life’s struggles, I was able to paint the picture of a speaker who was a conglomerate of these figures, including myself. This force moved through the pieces on a journey of redemption to liberation. Dr. Maya Angelou’s work, life, and testimonies were also places I frequented during this excavation of soul. I am truly standing on her shoulders as I work to become a better writer and person in this existence. If I can dare to be so unguarded in my work, it is because she paved the way and showed first that there was nothing to fear – that if anything, it was the world that should fear the storm within me.
How did you decide on the themes that run throughout your poetry book?
It was twofold, really. For the most part, in the first drafts of the collection, I just wrote about what was important to me and what I saw being issues in mankind. I turned to sermons that I had attended, in person and online, over the years, as well as to topics/issues that were socially and culturally relevant. I wanted the work to be encompassing, inclusive, and reflective of the journey a person takes when contemplating a walk with Christ in this modern day.
As the narrative builds through the pieces of the work, different themes become apparent in the topics the speaker decides to pursue: themes of wrestling with God, despair, redemption, heartbreak, self-loathing, longing, faith, belief, the dismal state of the world, and God’s saving grace. The middle of the work is dedicated to exposing and fleshing out issues with which the speaker must face a confrontation, like heartbreak and longing. The ending of the work is dedicated to the resolve that comes with the acceptance of God’s saving grace and confrontation.
The messages transferred on a Sunday morning inspired me to be reflective about the current soul condition of mankind, and the urgency communicated, instilled, and awakened within me, inspired the stark honesty in the lines. I wanted the collection to be a gathering place for those who did not quite have it right yet but were still unrelentingly trying. The themes came together on their own, really, as I set out with the intention to have the reader confront themselves in the lines. I knew a transformative collection meant that I had to be vulnerable if I wanted the Lord to shine through my testimonies.
Did you write these poems with a specific audience in mind, or was it a more personal endeavor?
My intention with these poems was to be as inclusive as possible. I wanted to appeal to the heart, soul, and conscience of the reader. The journey was simultaneously a personal endeavor and one that ambitioned the collective, universal heart.
I found that the transformation that I had experienced through confrontation and deconstruction for the
sake of these pieces (and for my own sake, if I’m honest) would be made available to the reader as they
journeyed from the beginning of the work to its end. This made it even more imperative to be honest and
unrelenting because there is a lot at stake: being an example of the power of the Grace of God and
exemplifying the transformative power of faith. I strongly believe that the audience will reveal themselves to be those who are open to letting the Lord into their problem areas and those who are searching for and
genuinely seeking a relationship with the Most High.
Bethesda, this house of Grace built by words, was constructed to be a gathering place for those who find
themselves ill at ease in today’s world order. Under its covering, one may find the opportunity to secure their redemption and begin the process of true liberation. At the crux of Bethesda is a journey to the increased intimacy with God that results from a genuinely contrite heart looking for God. Walking through the shadow of doubt, the reader is a witness to the perils of the world and the bravery of faith that comes as a result of persisting through the questions.
How has this poetry book changed you as a writer, or what did you learn about yourself through writing it?
I really had to fight with myself to believe that the reader would care about the issues I was bringing to light. I had to push myself to be what I requested of the reader: vulnerable. And then came the question of impact: how would the audience be affected?
These battles forced me to come to terms with the power of testimony. Using the example of testimonies I experienced in the Church, I saw firsthand that people may or may not see themselves in my story. The power comes in that somewhere in existence, my act of daring to be true and sharing would take our collective soul to another level of liberation in the current scheme of universal oppression gripping the heart of mankind. I walked so that someone else can run, even if that is just one person, and even if they have never heard of my book(s). It is a testament, testimony, and witness to the Grace of God on a whole other level, and I realized that these are things that matter most to me.
Though I abstracted and amplified certain things in the pieces, I had to evolve to a place where my own journey and past and present and all the things don’t shame me anymore. In full transparency, it’s a journey that I am still on, but I was obedient to the call to model what I saw to have transformative power in the world/Church. Bravery really does look different in the eyes of the brave.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Rendered from the Biblical porch where the sick, blind, deaf, and ailing were said to have lived and found reprieve, Bethesda frees the reader to a celebration of life, even in the places where it hurts the most. It explores what it means to be whole and moving as well as broken and stuck. Stuck in helplessness. Stuck in mercy. Stuck in hopelessness. It is a journey of the wondering of how one can give birth to the sometimes elusive tongue of healing. Bethesda is the victory of small steps away from the porch of heartbreak, longing, confusion and suffering.
In this barren womb of world order, we the lost, losing, finding and found, are a nation – an army. Take this journey through a fractured mind on the proverbial porch – that gathering place we now call Bethesda.
Bethesda
Bethesda is a collection of poems that moves through faith, pain, identity, womanhood, and longing with a voice that is raw and unguarded. The book feels like a spiritual and emotional journey, one that circles back to God again and again while navigating the heaviness of lived experience. Each poem stands on its own, but together they read like a layered confession. Grief, hope, Blackness, gender, memory, and divine yearning all braid together. The writing pulls from moments of despair and moments of revelation. The themes feel deeply personal yet still universal.
Reading this book stirred something in me. I kept feeling the author’s honesty press against me. Her words feel unfiltered in a way that made me stop more than once just to sit with the weight of what she had said. Sometimes the writing felt soft and vulnerable, then suddenly sharp, almost like a cry I wasn’t prepared for. There is a rhythm in these pages that made me sway between empathy and awe. The way she writes about faith hit me hardest. It felt like I was watching someone reach for God through fog. I felt the hunger in the lines about doubt. I felt the exhaustion in the moments she confessed her confusion.
I also found myself loving the poems that center on Black identity, womanhood, and generational ache. There’s courage in the writing and also a kind of weariness that comes from living too much too early. Sometimes the poems wander. Sometimes they dig straight down. But the variation gave the book its shape. I enjoyed how the language feels both poetic and conversational. There’s an unpolished beauty here. Some lines left me feeling protective of the speaker, and other lines felt like a rallying cry. I especially appreciated how the writer handles inner conflict. It isn’t neat. It isn’t solved. It just lives on the page.
I walked away feeling like this book is for anyone who has ever fought with themselves and still tried to choose hope. It’s for readers who want poetry that feels lived in and not curated. It’s for people who are navigating faith or identity or heartbreak and need a voice that says I’ve been there too. I would recommend Bethesda to those who enjoy emotional, spiritual, and introspective poetry that doesn’t shy away from the hard parts of life.
Pages: 109 | ASIN : B0F7HZJX6D
