Blog Archives
A Healthy Release
Poems For the Military Veteran, the American Worker, and the American Spirit celebrates the veterans, workers, families, freedoms, and everyday acts of perseverance that you see as the foundation of American character and life. What inspires you to write poetry?
My feelings about life tend to be deep, intense, and raw. Poetry allows me to express what I’m feeling openly and honestly. When I’ve gone through difficult trials and encountered frustrating situations, writing poetry is a healthy release so the feelings aren’t repressed or ignored.
How have your own experiences shaped the way you write about veterans, service, sacrifice, and returning home?
My writing is shaped by listening and showing empathy. I’ve had the honor to teach second and third graders at a base school, and I’ve heard and seen children weep when their parent is deployed and the burdens military families carry emotionally and financially can be very stressful. My poetry is an effort to translate that listening in a way that honors their sacrifice without claiming it as my own.
Why was it important to you to spotlight such a wide range of professions, from farmers and teachers to plumbers, firefighters, and rideshare drivers?
I chose to spotlight a wide range of professions because I believe all work provides a valuable service, and if that work is done honorably and with all your heart, it should be recognized. We’re created with different gifts and unique abilities, and the work we perform should demonstrate those gifts and abilities to the fullest.
You use direct forms such as limericks and acrostics throughout the book. What draws you to these styles of poetry?
I chose to focus on limericks and acrostics because they are creative ways to express humor and wit about friends and subjects that matter to me. Limericks and acrostics have been very enjoyable in my teaching, and I have found that younger children are willing to take more risks in writing using these two-poetry genre.
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Disconnected
Vivian Herkes’s Disconnected brings together speculative stories, surreal sketches, poems, and philosophical reflections about people trying to find a place in the world. Time, identity, loneliness, belief, technology, and political power recur throughout the book, giving its varied pieces a common center. Images of mist, clouds, masks, mirrors, and driftwood turn disconnection into something almost physical. The result feels like a tour through one restless imagination, with ideas and characters resurfacing in unexpected forms.
The short fiction contains the collection’s most developed ideas. “The Old Skoolgie” imagines a future collective consciousness that offers companionship at the cost of individuality, while “The Ghettold” follows a young man into a city where elderly people have been segregated and abandoned. “Faceless” is especially important because it connects Charlie Braeburn to the mysterious Mr. Preston from an earlier story, revealing how a desire to understand everyone can erode a person’s own identity. Herkes often builds these stories like fables, using grotesque twists, dark jokes, and literalized metaphors to examine isolation and institutional cruelty.
The poems give the book a more intimate feel. Pieces such as “For My Friend with Depression,” “Ghost,” and “Uncertainty” speak openly about affection, grief, insecurity, and the fear of losing oneself. Others, including “The Notion of I, in the Nation of We” and “Hell Is a Circus,” turn toward class, nationalism, violence, and political manipulation. The language is energetic and deliberately repetitive, with rhymes and recurring images creating the sensation of thoughts circling inside an anxious mind. Herkes’s hand-drawn illustrations complement that personal, homemade quality, while the self-satirizing “A Critical Review” shows an author willing to place his own doubts inside the collection.
The collection can be blunt, funny, tender, and disturbing, sometimes within the same piece. That emotional volatility suits a book concerned with minds that won’t remain comfortably settled. I’d recommend it most to readers who enjoy experimental small-press writing, speculative social satire, surreal fables, and poetry that values candor over polish. It’ll also speak to anyone interested in how loneliness shapes identity, or how the longing to belong can make individuals vulnerable to lovers, communities, ideologies, and technologies promising connection.
Pages: 101 | ASIN : B0HCT9VZNN
Acceptance is Not Surrender
Brokenness Becomes Beautiful is more than a collection of poetry and reflections; it is an intimate journey through loss, healing, self-acceptance, and the quiet courage of becoming someone new. What does the title Brokenness Becomes Beautiful mean to you personally?
To me, Brokenness Becomes Beautiful is about learning that what has been broken does not have to be hidden.
After my stroke, many parts of my life changed — my body, my speech, my confidence, and the way I saw myself. For a long time, I thought recovery meant trying to return to the person I had been before. Gradually, I began to understand that perhaps I was not meant to go back.
The title reflects that shift. Brokenness can leave scars, but those scars can also become part of something meaningful. Beauty, for me, is not about becoming perfect again. It is about accepting the fragments, carrying them with honesty, and discovering that a different life can still hold purpose, dignity, and hope.
What has living with aphasia taught you about language and communication?
Aphasia has taught me that communication is much larger than words.
Before my stroke, I rarely thought about speaking. Words simply came. After aphasia, even a simple sentence could become difficult. I might know exactly what I wanted to say but be unable to find the words to express it.
That experience has changed my perspective about communication. I have learnt that we communicate through pauses, gestures, expressions, writing, silence, patience, and simply being present with another person.
It has also taught me how important it is to give someone time. When a person with aphasia struggles to speak, it does not mean there is nothing inside. The thoughts and emotions are still there. Sometimes they simply need another way — and a little more time — to come through.
What does self-acceptance mean when someone is adjusting to changes they never chose?
Self-acceptance does not mean that I have to like everything that happened to me.
I did not choose my stroke. I did not choose aphasia, weakness, dependence, or the many changes that followed. There are still moments when I miss the person I once was and the things that once came easily.
For me, self-acceptance means no longer fighting every part of the person I have become.
It is recognising my limitations without allowing them to define my entire life. It is giving myself permission to grieve what was lost while also remaining open to what may still be possible.
Acceptance is not surrender. It is making peace with reality so that I can continue moving forward from where I am, rather than spending my life wishing I were somewhere else.
How has sharing your experience publicly affected your own understanding of recovery?
Sharing my experience has made me realise that recovery is much more complicated than I once imagined.
When I first began writing about my stroke, I was trying to make sense of what had happened to me. But when other stroke survivors, people with aphasia, caregivers, and families began responding to my words, I started to see that many of the emotions I thought were mine alone were shared by others.
Their stories have changed my understanding of recovery.
I no longer see recovery simply as getting stronger, speaking better, or reaching a particular milestone. Recovery can also mean learning to live with uncertainty, rebuilding relationships, finding confidence again, discovering purpose, and accepting that progress is rarely a straight line.
By sharing my journey publicly, I have also had to look at my own experience more deeply. Writing and speaking about what happened forced me to confront emotions I might otherwise have kept buried — grief, frustration, fear, vulnerability, and the struggle to understand who I was becoming. It also made me pay more attention to my mental and emotional well-being, not just my physical recovery.
Over time, I came to understand that healing also means learning how to live with those emotions, rather than pretending they are not there.
Writing has become a way of witnessing my recovery rather than measuring it. I can see that I am still changing, still learning, and still becoming.
Perhaps that is what recovery means to me now: not returning to who I was, but continuing to discover who I can become.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Instagram | Website | Amazon
These poems were not written to offer easy answers. They were born out of searching — through days of questioning, nights of reflection, and the slow, often difficult process of growth. In this collection, Terence explores what happens when life breaks us in quiet, unexpected ways, and how those moments of fracture can become the very places where truth, healing, and transformation begin.
Moving through themes of self-discovery, self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-love, self-healing, self-care, self-growth, and self-empowerment, Brokenness Becomes Beautiful does not turn away from pain or hide behind polished illusions. Instead, it creates a brave and compassionate space where vulnerability is honoured, honesty becomes strength, and becoming is seen as its own kind of beauty.
This is a book for anyone who has ever felt wounded, lost, or uncertain, yet continues to move forward one small step at a time. Gentle yet powerful, Brokenness Becomes Beautiful reminds readers that even in brokenness, something new and beautiful is already taking shape.
Brokenness Becomes Beautiful: Inspiring Pieces of Poetry
Terence Ang’s Brokenness Becomes Beautiful is an intimate collection of poetry and personal reflection shaped by his recovery from a stroke and his experience of aphasia. Its eight chapters trace a thoughtful progression from self-discovery to self-empowerment, giving the book the feeling of a guided inner journey. Ang writes with openness about a body that has changed, words that no longer arrive easily, and the difficult work of meeting the person he’s becoming. The result is tender, candid, and deeply attentive to the small acts of courage that recovery requires.
The poems are spare and accessible, often building their meaning through images drawn from nature and everyday life. A cracked vase still holds flowers, a seed grows while hidden underground, and a tiny flame contains the possibility of transformation. Mirrors, wounds, rivers, stars, and light return throughout the collection, gathering emotional weight as the book unfolds. These familiar objects become a language for experiences that can be hard to name, allowing Ang to speak about grief, patience, self-worth, and hope with striking clarity.
Each group of poems is followed by a longer reflection that brings Ang’s lived experience into sharper focus. Here he writes plainly about frustration, vulnerability, physical limitations, and the loss of his former fluency. He also shows how writing has given him another way to listen to himself and reach other people. The contrast between the compact poems and the conversational reflections works especially well, creating a rhythm of feeling, pause, and understanding. Aphasia is part of the book’s very texture, making each act of expression feel deliberate and earned.
This is a companion for readers rebuilding a life, identity, or sense of possibility after an unexpected change. Ang’s encouragement feels personal because it grows from ongoing struggle, not distant hindsight. He understands that healing can mean taking one better step, finding one clearer word, setting one necessary boundary, or simply refusing to disappear. Brokenness Becomes Beautiful offers a warm, honest vision of wholeness as something spacious enough to include every scar. Terence Ang turns the language of brokenness into a new vocabulary for beauty, courage, and becoming.
Pages: 136 | ASIN : B0HC87NGHP
Deep Emotions
Across 104 poems, The Spine of My Soul traces a life through love, grief, illness, abuse, survival, and renewal. What led you to organize the collection into “The Good,” “The Bad,” and “The Ugly?”
I organized The Spine of My Soul into “The Good,” “The Bad,” and “The Ugly” because those sections reflect the different seasons and experiences that have shaped my life. My journey has included love, joy, and moments of beauty, but also grief, illness, abuse, fear, and the difficult realities I had to survive. Dividing the collection this way allowed me to honor each part of the journey honestly, without minimizing the painful experiences or overlooking the moments of strength, hope, and renewal.
The poem I wrote about my life stood out to me as a fitting prologue for the book. It introduces the experiences, emotions, and themes that unfold throughout the collection, giving readers a sense of where I have been and how those experiences have shaped who I am. Beginning with that poem felt natural because it offers an honest glimpse into my story before leading into “The Good,” “The Bad,” and “The Ugly.” Together, the sections represent the complexity of life—the beauty, the pain, and everything in between.
How did you approach writing about deeply personal experiences such as abuse, illness, grief, and caregiving while protecting both your emotional well-being and the integrity of the work?
Writing about my husband’s current cancer journey has been the most difficult for me. It brings up some of the hardest and most painful feelings—fear, uncertainty, sadness, and helplessness. Putting those emotions into words can be overwhelming, but writing also gives me a way to process what we’re going through and to honor his strength and our journey together.
I’ve already worked through and reprocessed most of my past traumas, so I can remember those experiences without feeling strongly emotionally attached to them anymore. They remain part of my story, but they no longer carry the same intensity. In contrast, my husband’s cancer journey is happening in the present, which makes the emotions immediate, raw, and much more difficult to write about.
I write to help myself process the deep emotions that can sometimes feel too overwhelming to express in any other way. Writing allows me to make sense of what I’m experiencing, release some of the pain, and find meaning in the difficult moments. I choose to publish my words in the hope that they might support others who are facing their own struggles and remind them that they are not alone. If sharing my journey through life can offer comfort, encouragement, or even a sense of connection to someone else, then opening my heart feels worthwhile.
The title poem describes the collection as an open door for people who believe they are fighting alone; when did you realize that reaching those readers was central to the book’s purpose?
I realized that reaching readers who feel alone was central to the book’s purpose when I reflected on the contrast between the different seasons of my life. During the “good times,” I had people all around me—celebrating with me, sharing my joy, and reminding me that I wasn’t alone. But during the “bad” and “ugly” times, I often felt isolated, as though no one else understood what I was experiencing or could see the depth of what I was carrying.
That contrast stayed with me. It made me understand how important it is for people to know that their pain does not make them isolated, even when it feels that way. The Spine of My Soul became more than a collection of my personal experiences; it became an open door—a way of saying, “You are welcome here. You are seen. You are not alone.” I never want anyone to feel alone in their journey again. By sharing the difficult truths alongside the moments of love, survival, and renewal, I hope the book helps readers recognize something of themselves in my words and find comfort, connection, and perhaps the strength to keep going.
Why did you choose “Unlearning the Script” as the final poem, and what does reclamation mean to you now that the collection is complete?
I chose “Unlearning the Script” as the final poem because it represents the ongoing process of releasing the beliefs, expectations, and survival patterns that were shaped by difficult experiences. Throughout the collection, I move through love, grief, illness, abuse, survival, and renewal. Ending with this poem felt right because it reflects the moment when I begin to understand that I am not limited to what happened to me or to the version of myself that adversity forced me to become.
Reclamation, to me, means finding myself again. It means reclaiming who I was meant to be before difficult circumstances reshaped me—before pain, fear, and survival taught me to hide parts of who I was. It is not about pretending those experiences never happened; it is about recognizing that they do not have the final say in my identity or my future. “Unlearning the Script” closes the collection with a sense of freedom and possibility. It acknowledges that healing is an ongoing process of questioning the stories I inherited, the labels placed upon me, and the narratives I created in order to survive. Now that the collection is complete, reclamation means choosing to write my own story—with honesty, compassion, and the courage to become the person I might have been had adversity not shaped me so profoundly.
Ceylon Moon
Ceylon Moon is a poetry collection built around memory, dreams, aging, identity, nature, and the uneasy business of trying to make meaning from a finite life. Aaron Gedaliah organizes the book into five sections that gradually move from childhood and personal recollection into dream life, questions of sanity, imagined voices from the natural world, and finally the experience of growing older. That structure gives the collection a real sense of progression. Early poems such as “I Am Becoming” capture the almost overwhelming vitality of childhood, while later poems look back on youth from a much greater distance. Gedaliah explains in the preface that childhood, dreams, sanity, nature, aging, and the absurdity of life are the central concerns of the book, and those themes keep returning in different forms.
The collection is especially strong when Gedaliah lets an ordinary experience open into something much larger. A toddler running downhill, a morning beside the Mekong, an old temple, a text message from a former lover, a pair of glasses, or a sleepless night can all become occasions for thinking about memory and identity. The poems frequently move between the physical world and an interior one, so landscapes, music, paintings, dreams, and personal recollections seem to talk to one another. That quality is especially vivid in “Ceylon Moon,” where a neglected piece of art becomes almost sentient, carrying with it distant places, submerged memories, and an atmosphere of longing. The language throughout the collection tends toward the sensory and dreamlike, with recurring images of moonlight, water, twilight, trees, music, silence, and shifting shades of blue and violet.
Gedaliah also has a playful philosophical streak, particularly in the “With [in] Sanity” and “The Voices” sections. Poems such as “Being Insane” and “Being in Between” treat sanity and madness less as fixed opposites than as forces people continually negotiate, with conformity on one side and freedom, impulse, and creativity on the other. In “The Voices,” stone, trees, clouds, mountains, and the sea are given their own perspectives, and the effect is surprisingly intimate. Nature becomes a way of talking about stability, memory, surrender, and the human desire to find significance outside ourselves. “A Song of the Sea,” for example, imagines the sea as an ancient rhythm binding us to existence, while “A Song of Letting Go” turns the seasonal loss of leaves into a meditation on accepting time and change.
Toward the end, the collection becomes increasingly concerned with aging, physical decline, estrangement from a more automated world, remembered intimacy, and the approach of death, but it keeps returning to gratitude and connection. “Because My Time Is Limited” places the speaker’s brief life against an immense and indifferent universe, yet arrives at astonishment. The closing poem, “What Is Life?,” reduces the book’s many questions to a simple chain connecting truth, memory, love, and the fragile experiences that give a life its meaning. I’d recommend Ceylon Moon most to readers who enjoy reflective, philosophical poetry and who are drawn to writers such as Rilke, Pessoa, Camus, or poets who use dreams, art, music, and nature as ways of thinking about consciousness. It should especially resonate with readers who’ve reached an age where memory feels less like a record of the past and more like something living alongside the present.
Pages: 84 | ASIN : B0HFQPBLZN
I Was, Am, Will Be
J. R. Rice’s I Was, Am, Will Be is a collection of poetry, prose, dramatic scenes, letters, and visual compositions arranged as a journey through identity, grief, love, race, mental illness, family, and artistic purpose. Its seven chapters move from the compulsion to write through romance, cultural alienation, trauma, mortality, and remembrance, creating the shape of a coming-of-age narrative without relying on a conventional plot. Travel through Greece, France, Spain, and the Netherlands gives the speaker physical distance from Oakland, while memory keeps drawing him back to family, formative losses, and the experiences that made writing necessary. The result is an autobiographical work whose structure reflects its central concern: how a person gathers a coherent self from scattered places, relationships, and versions of the past.
Rice’s voice is energetic, exposed, and deliberately restless. He moves between formal allusion, conversational humor, spoken-word repetition, pop-culture references, and blunt confession, often allowing several registers to occupy the same poem. That flexibility suits a speaker who understands himself through many inheritances, including Black literary tradition, hip-hop, teaching, Oakland, family history, and European travel. In “Affirmations,” the repeated question “Why write?” develops into an account of writing as survival, witness, ancestry, and civic responsibility. Elsewhere, comic encounters in bars, museums, cafés, and bedrooms keep the book grounded in ordinary experience, even when its themes become philosophical. Rice’s strongest passages let wit and sorrow work together, so humor becomes part of the speaker’s endurance rather than a pause from serious material.
The collection’s emotional force grows as its recurring images gain meaning. Stairs, cliffs, flight, falling, trees, water, mirrors, and roads repeatedly place the speaker between danger and transformation. The line “You are what remains from damage” captures the book’s guiding insight: identity can contain injury without being reduced to it. The later chapters deepen that idea through accounts of bipolar disorder, suicidal thought, gun violence, childhood sexual abuse, pregnancy loss, and a father’s terminal illness. These subjects are handled with a directness that can be harrowing, yet the collection consistently searches for language capable of carrying pain toward understanding. Its repetitions sometimes feel incantatory and sometimes obsessive, accurately reflecting a mind returning to unresolved memories until they yield a different meaning.
The final movement toward family and remembrance gives the book its clearest sense of arrival. In “Depends,” the narrator’s care for his dying father transforms dependency, embarrassment, anger, and tenderness into a scene of difficult intimacy. Their exchange ends with the father’s answer, “Depends,” a modest conclusion that fits a book committed to uncertainty, choice, and continual becoming. I Was, Am, Will Be is ultimately a record of self-reclamation, one that treats writing as testimony, discipline, inheritance, and a reason to remain alive. Rice’s expansive form allows the collection to hold contradictions without smoothing them away, and its most enduring achievement is the portrait of a speaker learning that freedom comes through remembering, naming, forgiving, and choosing to live.
Pages: 34 | ISBN : 978-1088026465
A Common Thread
An Atlas of Ordinary Wonders: Dispatches from the Edge is a beautifully curated collection of photographic essays celebrating the extraordinary stories hidden within ordinary places. What inspired you to gather these twenty photo essays into a single collection?
The idea for An Atlas of Ordinary Wonders: Dispatches from the Edge grew out of a desire to bring together photographs and stories that might otherwise remain scattered across different places and different moments in my travels. The twenty photo essays originally appeared in Edge of Humanity Magazine, and I wanted to give them a second life as a single volume.
What connects these essays is not geography so much as a way of seeing. I have always been drawn to places that reveal something about the human experience—markets, streets, neighborhoods, forgotten landscapes, religious spaces, and communities that may not appear on a conventional tourist itinerary. A livestock market in Kashgar, a historic Chinese settlement in California, a night market in Taiwan, or the stark landscape of Namibia can seem very different on the surface. Still, each contains stories about identity, history, resilience, work, and everyday life.
The title An Atlas of Ordinary Wonders reflects that idea. Travel has taught me that wonder isn’t necessarily found in famous landmarks. Sometimes it is found in an old wall, a stranger’s expression, a crowded market, or a place that most people pass by. I wanted the book to encourage readers to slow down and look more closely at the seemingly ordinary world around them.
Your travels take readers from Kashgar and Haiti to Namibia and South Korea. How did you choose the destinations that appear in the book?
The destinations were chosen less by a checklist of countries than by the stories and visual possibilities I encountered there. Having traveled extensively, I have learned to remain open to places that surprise me. Sometimes I arrive somewhere because I have been fascinated by its history or culture; other times, a location presents itself as an unexpected photographic opportunity.
I am particularly attracted to places where layers of history, culture, and everyday life intersect. Markets are a good example. They are not simply places where people buy and sell things; they are living portraits of a community. Architecture can tell similar stories, as can street art, religious traditions, abandoned places, and ordinary moments of daily life.
I also look for a sense of place that cannot easily be separated from the people who inhabit it. The locations in this collection are geographically diverse, but I hope the photographs reveal a common thread: wherever we live, people create meaning through their surroundings. My goal is not simply to photograph where I have been, but to photograph what those places have to say.
The book includes discussions of lenses, lighting, and composition. Why was it important to share the technical side of the creative process?
Photography is both an art and a craft. I wanted the book to address both sides of that equation. I started including this information with my previous book, Around the World in Eighty Photos. There, it was focused on the thought process and settings for creating a single image, whereas here it is about creating a series of images.
A photograph may appear spontaneous, but there are usually dozens of decisions behind it—where to stand, which lens to use, how to frame the subject, what to include or exclude, how to respond to the available light, and sometimes, most importantly, when to wait. Sharing those considerations gives readers a glimpse into how I approach a scene rather than simply presenting the finished image.
I also wanted the technical discussions to be useful to photographers who are interested in travel photography themselves. You don’t need the most expensive equipment to create a meaningful photograph. Understanding light, composition, perspective, and timing is far more important than having a particular camera or lens.
Ultimately, though, technique is in service of storytelling. I don’t want readers to look at a photograph and think only about the equipment used to make it. I want them to feel something, become curious about the place, and perhaps imagine themselves standing there. The technical choices matter because they help translate an experience into an image.
How has your approach to travel photography changed over the past decade?
Perhaps the biggest change is that I have become more patient. Earlier in my travels, I was often focused on seeing and photographing as much as possible. Over time, I have become more interested in slowing down and allowing a place to reveal itself.
I have also become less interested in making photographs that simply announce, “I was here.” The iconic photograph of a destination has its place, but I’m increasingly drawn to the quieter, less obvious moments—the details, gestures, textures, faces, shadows, and encounters that communicate something deeper about a place.
My approach has also become more intentional. I think more about the story I am trying to tell and how individual photographs relate to one another. A single photograph can be powerful, but a series can create a much richer sense of place.
And, perhaps most importantly, travel photography has taught me to pay greater attention to people. The longer I travel, the more I realize that geography is only part of what makes a place distinctive. Places are ultimately shaped by the people who live in them. My camera has become a way of listening—quietly, visually, and with curiosity. I hope my photographs reflect that sense of connection and respect.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
Blending documentary photography with reflective storytelling, An Atlas of Ordinary Wonders invites readers to slow down and look closer. Each chapter offers an intimate portrait of place, culture, labor, memory, or survival, celebrating the small rituals and human connections that shape life across continents. More than a travel book, it is a meditation on curiosity, empathy, and the quiet wonders waiting at the edge of the familiar.
