To Say Goodbye Again is a short but emotionally wide-ranging collection that moves through grief, memory, love, masculinity, work, faith, family, and trauma with a striking lack of self-protective distance. Author Jac Winters writes in a mode that is part confessional poetry, part personal testimony, and part manifesto, so the book feels less like a curated sequence than a life speaking in bursts. It begins in mourning, circles through pieces about childhood, parents, romance, trucking, and the death of a beloved dog, and culminates in “Princess,” a devastating autobiographical account of childhood abuse that recasts much of the book in a harsher, sadder light. What stayed with me most was the sense that Winters is trying, again and again, to turn private pain into language sturdy enough to carry it.

There’s very little irony here, and almost no cool detachment. Winters writes as someone who means every line, and that sincerity gives the collection its force. “To Say Goodbye Again” and “Please Remember Me” ache with a plainspoken fear of loss and disappearance, while “Big Ben,” about the sudden death of a dog, is so direct in its grief that it almost disarms criticism. Even “No Matter Where I Go,” with its return to the childhood block, has an unguarded tenderness that I found genuinely affecting. I believed the emotional stake in nearly all of the poems. The book’s warmth comes not from polish but from exposure. Winters is willing to sound earnest, wounded, grateful, furious.

Winters often reaches for grandeur, piling image on image, and sometimes that intensity lands beautifully. Even when the phrasing grows ornate, the ideas underneath are clear: love dignifies us, work hardens and defines us, grief rearranges the soul, and survival demands that a person stop hiding. I found “Fueled My Drive” especially revealing in that respect because it frames self-acceptance not as branding or self-help, but as a hard-won moral act. And once I reached “Princess,” the whole collection changed shape for me. Its lyrical approach to such unbearable material won’t work for every reader, but I found it haunting precisely because it preserves the confusion of a child’s memory alongside the adult voice trying to name what happened.

I came away feeling that To Say Goodbye Again is vulnerable and deeply felt, which is also why it resonated with me. I think its greatest strength is emotional candor, the feeling that someone is finally saying the thing they’ve carried too long in silence. I’d recommend it to readers who value autobiographical poetry, reflective writing about grief and endurance, and books that care more about truth-telling than literary neatness. This is the kind of book that doesn’t ask to be admired so much as it asks to be felt.

Pages: 52 | ASIN: B0G4S75CW1