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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.
Fundamental Pillars of Life
A Poetic Wandering is a reflective collection spanning four decades in which you explore memory, family, Kansas history, travel, nature, faith, humor, and the experiences that shape a life. What role has poetry played in helping you process emotions, develop self-awareness, and make sense of your experiences?
Growing up as an only child, I wasn’t able to compare life experiences or receive guidance from a sibling. There were times I felt lonely, times I felt life was unfair, times when anger reared its ugly head. Writing became a means to document and work through some of life’s instabilities. The process eventually created opportunities for stronger self-confidence and self-esteem.
How has becoming a parent—and later reflecting on family across generations—influenced your poetry?
As one ages, we realize more and more the true importance of faith, family, and friends. I was truly blessed to grow up with parents who believed in these tenets. As parents, my wife and I tried to instill these beliefs in our own children. Sharing these fundamental pillars of life through family generations only makes sense.
Your collection moves comfortably between serious subjects and humorous poems about aging, grilling, toilet paper, and everyday life. Why is humor important to the overall balance of the book?
Poetry should be reflective at times, entertaining at times. I want readers to understand what I am sharing without having to dissect obscure, remote, or hidden meanings. Regarding humor…didn’t Ficino say “Humor Is the Spice of Life.”
What do you hope readers—especially parents, grandparents, travelers, and people reflecting on their own lives—take away from A Poetic Wandering?
I hope that by sharing my thoughts and experiences, it may help others to BE POETIC themselves.
Author Links: Website
A Poetic Wandering
Kevin R. Peterson’s A Poetic Wandering feels much like its title suggests: a long, personal walk through memory, family, Kansas history, travel, nature, faith, humor, and the ordinary experiences that accumulate into a life. The collection reaches back to poems from Peterson’s 1980s chapbooks and then moves into work written across the following four decades, so the reader gets something close to a poetic autobiography. Peterson explains that poetry became a way for him to work through emotions, develop self-awareness, reflect on experience, and share what he’d learned, and that purpose remains visible throughout the book. The result is a collection that’s interested less in maintaining a single mood than in recording the things a person notices and carries with him over many years.
The most affecting section is the group of poems drawn from Kendra: A Father’s Feelings. Here Peterson writes about his young daughter’s grave illness, survival, deafness, and the family’s adjustment to a frightening new reality. The poems are plainspoken and emotionally immediate. In “Hospital Paradox,” the birth of one child and the medical crisis of another exist almost side by side, while “Can It Be” captures the complicated mixture of gratitude and sorrow after his daughter survives but loses her hearing. “Roller Skates” then turns a Christmas gift into something far larger, because having their daughter home and alive has changed what the family values. These poems are strong because Peterson trusts the events themselves to carry the emotion. That directness gives the family material an intimacy that stays with you.
Elsewhere, the book widens considerably. Kansas appears again and again through prairie landscapes, pioneers, bison, Dust Bowl memories, sunflowers, local history, and Peterson’s sense of generational connection to the land. Travel adds another dimension, with poems about Yellowstone, Florida, wilderness hiking, canoe country, sunsets, campsites, and the decades-long project of visiting all fifty states with his wife. Nature often becomes a doorway into something spiritual. Peterson says explicitly that it’s where he feels most comfortable and where he most strongly connects with God. There’s also a welcome streak of playfulness, including poems about toilet paper, aging, grilling, and other subjects that keep the collection from becoming uniformly meditative. Near the end, Peterson brings poetry and photography together in what he calls a “poetograph,” combining his own images with brief poetic responses. That makes the closing pages feel like a natural culmination of two lifelong interests.
I’d recommend A Poetic Wandering to readers who enjoy accessible, personal poetry rooted in recognizable experiences rather than poetry that needs to be decoded before it can be felt. It should have particular appeal for Midwestern readers, nature lovers, travelers, parents and grandparents, people interested in family or regional history, and readers who’ve reached an age when looking backward and looking forward begin to happen at the same time. Peterson writes with the perspective of someone interested in preserving memories while he still has the chance to name them, whether those memories involve a hospital room, a Kansas field, a campsite, a marriage, a family tragedy, or a ridiculous question about which way the toilet-paper roll should face. That range is the book’s real character. It reads like one man opening several decades of notebooks and photographs and inviting you to wander through them with him.
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.
Drinking From God’s Well
Theodore McDowell’s Drinking From God’s Well: Exploring the Journey From Trauma to Renewal and Recovery is a book-length poetry collection shaped as a spiritual and autobiographical account of addiction, mental illness, family trauma, grief, recovery, and faith. Its three-part structure moves from “The Struggle to Survive” through “Releasing the Pain” and finally to “Life on Life’s Terms,” giving the collection a clear emotional progression from crisis toward a more settled form of acceptance. McDowell writes repeatedly from the most difficult regions of his life: homelessness, substance abuse, a traumatic brain injury, bipolar disorder, estrangement from his children, the deterioration of his marriage, his sister’s suicide, his mother’s dementia, and his own encounters with suicidal despair. Yet the collection treats these experiences as parts of an ongoing spiritual life. The result is poetry that functions at once as memoir, confession, prayer, lament, and meditation on how a damaged life can be gathered into meaning.
McDowell’s strongest poetic feature is his recurring network of images. Jazz is especially important. Saxophones, improvisation, rhythm, silence, and blues become ways of understanding marriage, grief, mental illness, and recovery. Nature serves a similar purpose. Redbud trees, morning glories, egrets, lakes, storms, and falling leaves give physical form to emotional states that might otherwise remain abstract. These repeated images also create continuity across poems written from different stages of life. A storm can embody marital conflict in one poem, while morning light becomes an image of reconciliation in another. Water shifts from danger and uncertainty to cleansing, grace, and renewal. McDowell’s Christian imagery is equally persistent, but his faith is rarely presented as effortless certainty. God is questioned, resisted, cursed, sought, and finally experienced through suffering, forgiveness, human intimacy, and ordinary moments. This tension gives the spiritual dimension of the book much of its substance.
The collection is particularly effective when McDowell turns from his own suffering toward the people who endured its consequences. Poems about his wife and children complicate the recovery narrative by insisting that sobriety alone can’t repair years of injury. In “An Amends to My Daughter,” the speaker tries to listen without defending himself as his daughter describes the damage addiction caused during her childhood. The emotional turning point arrives not with easy reconciliation but with her quiet statement, “I finally feel heard.” That moment captures one of the book’s central understandings of forgiveness: healing requires attention, accountability, time, and the willingness to remain present before another person’s pain. Throughout the collection, marriage is treated with similar seriousness. Love appears as desire, memory, resentment, caretaking, endurance, physical intimacy, companionship, and spiritual shelter. McDowell’s imagery can be highly concentrated, sometimes layering biblical, musical, natural, and erotic references within the same poem, but that density reflects the way the book understands memory itself. The past is continually resurfacing inside the present, transformed by age but never entirely erased.
Drinking From God’s Well has broadened from survival and recovery into a meditation on aging, mortality, gratitude, and the sacred character of ordinary life. Grandchildren, morning coffee, gardening, family meals, walks, music, a wife’s presence in another room, and the simple experience of waking sober acquire the significance that earlier poems gave to catastrophe. McDowell doesn’t portray renewal as the disappearance of trauma. In “Trauma and Grace,” he describes the continuing work of recovery as “finding the miracle / within the marrow of suffering,” while accepting wounds and scar tissue as part of the foundation of renewal. That idea provides an apt description of the entire collection. Drinking From God’s Well is a sustained poetic attempt to integrate suffering into a life that can still contain faith, intimacy, beauty, responsibility, and joy. Its final achievement is not a declaration that the past has been conquered, but a vision of a person able to inhabit his whole history and still recognize grace within it.
Pages: 310 | ASIN : B0D48ZDSRL
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
Excavating the Cruelty of Memories
Theodore McDowell’s Excavating the Cruelty of Memories: Exploring the Depths of Adult Trauma is a book of poetry that reads like an intensely personal memoir broken into lyric fragments. Its four sections move through traumatic brain injury, homelessness and street life, psychiatric hospitalization, and addiction, but the deeper subject running through all of them is identity: what happens to a person when memory, family, faith, work, and even a familiar sense of self become unstable. McDowell gives the collection a clear emotional architecture, so even as individual poems shift in time, perspective, and setting, they feel connected by one continuing struggle to understand the man who existed before the injuries and the man who survived them.
What gives the book its force is McDowell’s physical, restless imagery. Music is everywhere too, especially jazz and blues, giving the poems a pulse when the speaker’s life feels most disordered. Biblical language enters just as naturally, with God appearing as comforter, adversary, absence, mystery, and sometimes the only presence large enough to argue with. The result is poetry that feels lived. One of the collection’s most revealing moments comes when McDowell describes his injured brain as having been “rewired to speak in poetry,” turning words into the means by which a damaged identity can begin assembling itself again.
The book is also deeply concerned with the people standing near the center of the speaker’s suffering. His wife and children aren’t scenery in a story about illness. They carry wounds of their own, and several poems move into their emotional territory, allowing fear, resentment, exhaustion, tenderness, and loyalty to complicate the narrator’s understanding of himself. His parents and sister become equally powerful presences as therapy begins uncovering the violence and grief beneath idealized childhood memories. In the title poem, recollections that begin with fishing, a mother waving from a kitchen window, and a sister inventing heroic stories eventually open into alcoholism, domestic violence, abuse, and suicide. That excavation gives the collection its emotional depth. Trauma here isn’t one catastrophic event. It accumulates, resurfaces, changes shape, and travels through families.
By the end, recovery has become less a clean destination than a difficult practice of recognition. Sobriety, forgiveness, marriage, aging, grief, faith, and self-knowledge all remain unsettled, which makes the closing poems feel earned. Even the last poem leaves McDowell kneeling at a literal crossroads, still wrestling with God, death, memory, and the question of what comes next. That choice suits a book whose greatest strength is its willingness to remain inside contradiction: beauty beside degradation, love beside damage, belief beside fury, and survival beside the persistent pull of self-destruction. Excavating the Cruelty of Memories is a fierce, intimate testament to the way a shattered life can find its voice without pretending the cracks have disappeared.
Pages: 252 | ASIN : B0D98YQ6JZ
