Blog Archives
Staring at a Blank Page: 30 Days of Poetry and other Musings
Nadine K. Thompson’s 30 Days of Poetry and Other Musings brings together poems, personal reflections, and invitations to journal, all growing from a writing challenge she set herself in September 2023. Balancing writing with her work as an ESL teacher, Thompson committed to producing a poem and a wisdom thought each day. That commitment gives the collection its shape and its welcoming spirit: everyday experience becomes material worth thinking about, writing down, and sharing. Her subjects range from moving apartments and eating with friends to forgiveness, aging, and the pressure to succeed. There’s an appealing openness to that mix. Thompson treats creative practice as something that belongs inside a busy life, and the book makes her enthusiasm for that practice easy to understand.
In “Foot Massage,” a discounted treatment comes with awkward questions about her Jamaican background, giving the poem humor and a glimpse of life across cultures. “Teacher’s Day” captures the vulnerability behind wanting to be appreciated, then finds satisfaction in handmade gifts and sincere words. “Failure,” which follows students struggling to build catapults, makes perseverance feel tangible through a teacher’s decision about when to help. I especially liked “News from home,” where a missed call sparks anxiety before conversation restores the pleasure of connection. These moments give the book personality. They show how much can be happening emotionally during an ordinary appointment, school day, or phone call, and they make Thompson’s broader reflections feel earned.
Thompson’s writing is direct, energetic, and comfortable addressing the reader. Repetition, capital letters, and short commands give many poems the rhythm of spoken encouragement. She also experiments with presentation: “Pruning” arranges words about pain and growth across the page, while “Mindful Present” places past and present attitudes in parallel columns. The wisdom passages make the book’s teaching impulse explicit, often turning an experience into a question readers can explore themselves. At times, familiar motivational language and repeated advice about growth and letting go soften the individuality of the writing. Some explanations also spell out meanings the poems have already conveyed. The more detailed pieces carry greater force, including the bonus poem “Laundry Days,” which develops a sustained comparison between washing clothes and shaping a piece of writing. “A Dark Night” and the older poem “Hope” bring fear and distress into the collection’s generally buoyant mood.
I’d recommend this book to people who enjoy reflective journaling, spiritually inclined readers, and writers trying to establish or recover a regular creative habit. Teachers may also appreciate how naturally Thompson draws meaning from classroom experiences, while readers living far from family will recognize the emotional importance of calls home. Her spiritual outlook draws on faith, prayer, meditation, and ideas about energy, giving the reflections a broad range of influences. Reading one entry at a time would suit the book well, especially with a notebook nearby and a few minutes to answer its questions. Its chief appeal is Thompson’s willingness to share both the experiences and the effort behind her writing. That generosity makes picking up a pen feel like an achievable next step.
Pages: 66 | ASIN : B0HM64JQN7
I Did Not Survive. I Just Refused To Stop.
I Did Not Survive. I Just Refused To Stop. is a collection of essays, poems, brief scenes, and observations about the demands placed on women, especially within the Desi Muslim communities the author knows. Writing as MissFit, the author draws on her own experiences and stories entrusted to her by other women. The book moves through five parts, from “The Cage” to “The Flight,” tracing a shift from social scrutiny and private distress toward a life shaped by personal choice. Its subjects range from marriage proposals and career expectations to religious practice, consumer habits, desire, and the freedom to take pleasure in ordinary things.
MissFit’s humor is sharpest when she lets a scene carry the argument. In one memorable account, strangers help a cyclist gather vegetables spilled across a Dubai street, only to hear him complain, “Please keep tomatoes separate.” The encounter becomes a compact portrait of how readily generosity can be met with another demand. Elsewhere, the author questions why a woman’s title changes with marriage, why a family’s preferred profession can outweigh a child’s interests, and how luxury goods acquire authority over individual taste. Her jokes and lists give these familiar pressures a recognizable voice. They also establish the social world from which the book’s more painful accounts emerge.
As the collection progresses, its wit gives way to writing about abuse, isolation, panic, and a moment of suicidal crisis. These passages ask the reader to sit with the consequences of silence enforced in the name of family reputation. The later sections examine faith with the same questioning attention MissFit brings to social custom. She recalls seeking an answer during a visit to Mecca and finding space for grief and argument in a quiet street. The book’s range is ambitious, and some short pieces make their point so quickly that a reader may wish for more of the detail found in its longer scenes. At its best, the movement between anecdote and verse gives the collection a rhythm that feels close to thought itself: a joke, a memory, a question that won’t go away.
The final part turns toward nature, play, kindness, and the act of writing. MissFit notices birds, rain, shells, tea, and the pleasure of being present; when someone asks whether she photographed a sunset, she answers, “I was there.” That small exchange captures the attention she wants to reclaim for herself. The closing pages don’t erase the injuries described earlier. They show a person choosing how to spend a day, what to value, and how to speak in her own voice. I Did Not Survive. I Just Refused To Stop. is most affecting when its defiance stays grounded in such particulars. Its lasting image is of a writer who has kept her capacity for wonder alongside her anger.
Pages: 245 | ASIN : B0H5CVNDNF
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Poetry
The Literary Titan Book Award recognizes poets who demonstrate exceptional artistry and proficiency and push the boundaries of language and expression. The recipients are poets who excel in their technical skills and evoke deep emotional responses, challenge thoughts, and illuminate new perspectives through their work. The award honors those who contribute to the literary landscape with their unique voices and powerful words.
Award Recipients
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Crazy Love
Crazy Love is a personal collection of poetry and journal entries that follows more than a decade of Adam Roa’s experiences with romance, longing, intimacy, heartbreak, and recovery. Roa arranges the book as an emotional progression through “Dream Love,” “Not-Quite Love,” “Scary Love,” “Our Love,” “Painful Love,” “Broken Love,” “Healing Love,” and finally “Empowered Love.” That structure gives the collection the feeling of a memoir even though there’s no conventional narrative running through it. The poems capture moments in concentrated form, while the journal entries slow things down and let us hear Roa question his choices, motives, fears, and ideas about what love is supposed to mean. He describes the material as real writing created across multiple relationships, with names and dates removed so the emotional experiences can stand on their own.
What makes the book compelling is how fully Roa commits to his emotional point of view. Early on, love is enormous, cosmic, destined, and almost impossible to separate from faith. He dreams about a partner he hasn’t met, imagines future children, prays for his “Queen,” and treats romantic intuition as something close to spiritual knowledge. As relationships become real, that certainty gets tested. Desire brings fear, intimacy exposes old wounds, and Roa becomes increasingly interested in the gap between loving someone and actually being able to build a healthy life with them. Some of the most revealing passages are the journal entries in which he notices his own defenses in real time, such as recognizing that moments of disconnection can trigger an urge to pull away even when a relationship is going well. The book’s spiritual vocabulary remains throughout, but the emotional questions become more grounded as it progresses.
The later sections give the collection its real weight. Roa writes openly about relationships unraveling, knowing he loves someone while also knowing he can’t choose the relationship, and eventually facing the uncomfortable fact that another person can become a convenient explanation for turmoil that also belongs to him. From there, healing becomes less about finding the correct romantic answer and more about recovering a sense of self. One poem moves from codependency toward sovereignty by asking what it means to want someone without needing them and to belong to oneself before trying to belong with another person. That development makes the ending especially effective. Roa admits that when he tried to assemble an “Empowered Love” section, most of the material still felt like healing. His eventual definition of empowerment is quieter: being alone, feeling peaceful, and no longer treating loneliness or sadness as evidence that something has gone wrong.
I’d recommend Crazy Love most strongly to readers who experience love intensely and enjoy poetry that feels like someone talking directly from the middle of an emotion. Fans of spoken-word poetry will probably connect especially well with Roa’s repetition, rhythm, direct address, and big emotional declarations, which makes sense since he notes that much of the poetry was originally written to be performed aloud. It should also resonate with people working through a breakup, reconsidering patterns of attachment, or trying to reconcile a belief in passionate romance with a stronger sense of personal sovereignty. The book begins with a man looking outward for a love that feels like home and ends with him discovering a version of home in his own company. Importantly, he doesn’t give up his belief in extraordinary romantic love. He simply reaches a place where he doesn’t need to chase it in order to feel whole, and that evolution gives the collection a satisfying emotional shape.
Pages: 303 | ASIN : B0H1WBJTVR
The Last Poet on Wall Street
Michael Goodwin’s The Last Poet on Wall Street is a coming-of-age novel set against the money, ambition, art, nightlife, and social climbing of 1980s New York. At its center is James Alexander, a gifted young poet from Tennessee who gives up a Yale fellowship for commodities trading with his wealthy college friend Lark Campbell. That choice opens the door to spectacular profits, an expensive apartment, Italian sports cars, glamorous parties, and a Manhattan crowd where artists and financiers seem to be chasing different versions of the same thing: recognition. Goodwin makes James’s transformation the real story. He arrives in New York still carrying poetry, Sarah, his family, and an idealistic sense of beauty with him, even as he grows increasingly fluent in money and status. The novel is explicitly framed as fiction about Wall Street, coming of age, finance, relationships, and love, and all of those threads stay tightly connected throughout James’s rise and fall.
What makes the book especially interesting is the way James’s love of poetry keeps rubbing against his appetite for success. Early on, he and Sarah are young idealists talking about reviving poetry, and James’s own poem “Autumn Turning” ends with the idea of continually returning to oneself. That idea quietly becomes the architecture of the whole novel. James keeps reinventing himself as trader, millionaire, social insider, lover, and would-be movie producer, but the earlier version of himself never disappears. The finance scenes have genuine momentum, particularly when James and Lark make and lose staggering amounts of money in short bursts, yet the book is just as interested in what happens after the adrenaline fades. James repeatedly reaches a moment of triumph only to discover a strange hollowness underneath it. That tension gives the novel more weight than a simple story of Wall Street excess. It’s about a young man trying to decide whether achievement can tell him who he is.
Goodwin also has fun with the sheer weirdness of the era. His Manhattan is crowded with debutantes, aristocrats, hedge fund clients, artists, models, club regulars, hustlers, and people whose identities seem partly invented for the evening. The scenes can be flamboyant and funny, with James moving through them as both participant and observer. In that respect, the book reminded me most of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Both novels treat New York as a giant machine for producing appetite, status anxiety, spectacle, and self-invention. Wolfe spreads his satire across a large social ecosystem, while Goodwin keeps returning to James’s divided inner life, particularly the tug between his literary sensibility and his growing hunger to be someone important. There’s also a touch of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City in the clubs, drugs, late nights, and emotional disorientation, but Goodwin gives his protagonist a more philosophical temperament. James can be ridiculous, selfish, perceptive, wounded, and unexpectedly tender within the same stretch of pages, which makes his unraveling feel personal rather than merely symbolic.
The closing movement is the strongest part for me because the book eventually brings its concerns about money, family, ego, art, memory, and mortality into the same space. After the fortune and the social identity collapse, James is forced into a much simpler encounter with himself. By the final pages, he reaches something he describes as a kind of equanimity, and the ending turns toward the possibility that losing the identity he constructed might be the beginning of a more genuine one. Goodwin resists turning that realization into a neat conversion. Instead, James is only beginning to understand what’s happened to him and how much ego he still has to dismantle. The final image is wonderfully ordinary: food, evening light, gratitude, and the recognition that something can be mysterious, nourishing, and good in the way a good poem can be. The Last Poet on Wall Street reads like a novel about appetite in all its forms, and about the difficult work of figuring out which hungers are actually your own.
Pages: 318 | ASIN : B0GHSRSFG6
Poems For the Military Veteran, the American Worker, and the American Spirit
Brian Taylor’s Poems For the Military Veteran, the American Worker, and the American Spirit is a patriotic poetry collection centered on service, freedom, work, family, perseverance, and civic responsibility. Across more than eighty poems, Taylor moves between tributes to military personnel, reflections on constitutional freedoms, celebrations of working Americans, and encouragement to pursue personal goals. The collection opens by presenting America as a place of opportunity and endurance, declaring, “Keep celebrating what America offers / Remember the word united in the USA and learn to get along.” That emphasis on gratitude and unity establishes the book’s central perspective and continues through poems about the American flag, free enterprise, government, religion, speech, and national traditions.
Military service is one of the book’s strongest recurring subjects. Taylor writes about soldiers not only as defenders of the country but also as people shaped by loyalty, discipline, sacrifice, hardship, and fellowship. Poems such as “Accomplishing the Mission,” “Veterans,” “Honor,” “Oorah,” and “Thanking Soldiers” stress the bonds formed through service and the respect veterans deserve. The later poem “A Soldier’s Return Home” gives this theme a more personal dimension by acknowledging the difficulty of returning to ordinary life after combat. Its call to “Be a good listener without interruptions” presents support for veterans as a practical responsibility shared by families and communities.
The collection also devotes substantial attention to American workers and everyday life. Construction workers, plumbers, firefighters, teachers, business owners, Uber drivers, police officers, and farmers all receive individual poems, giving the book a broad view of labor as a source of usefulness, independence, and community strength. Taylor combines these occupational portraits with poems about board games, mealtimes, the Super Bowl, the Fourth of July, fireworks, friendship, and apple pie. These subjects create a picture of national identity built not only through public institutions and military service but also through ordinary routines, recreation, family relationships, and shared customs. The book’s frequent use of limericks and acrostics adds variety to its short, direct poetic forms.
Poems For the Military Veteran, the American Worker, and the American Spirit is a collection of affirmations about citizenship, service, ambition, faith, and appreciation. Taylor’s style is plainspoken and accessible, often addressing readers directly and encouraging them to value freedom, support others, work toward meaningful goals, and recognize the contributions of people around them. Poems such as “Courage,” “Inspiring Others,” “Being Steadfast,” and “Fear” extend the book’s patriotic themes into personal character, connecting national strength with individual determination and responsibility. The result is a sincere collection that treats patriotism as something expressed through military service, productive work, gratitude, family life, personal effort, and active participation in American civic life.
Pages: 90 | ASIN: B0F9C6CW8H
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Poetry
The Literary Titan Book Award recognizes poets who demonstrate exceptional artistry and proficiency and push the boundaries of language and expression. The recipients are poets who excel in their technical skills and evoke deep emotional responses, challenge thoughts, and illuminate new perspectives through their work. The award honors those who contribute to the literary landscape with their unique voices and powerful words.
Award Recipients
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
The Spine of my Soul
The Spine of My Soul is a deeply personal poetry collection that looks at a life through three broad lenses: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Across 104 poems, the collection moves through family, marriage, friendship, childhood memories, aging, grief, illness, abuse, betrayal, fear, and survival. That structure gives the book an emotional progression. The early poems spend time with grandchildren, longtime love, friendship, nature, childhood summers, and the ordinary moments that make a life feel full. As the collection moves into its “Bad” and “Ugly” sections, the material becomes increasingly intimate, confronting cancer, dementia, domestic violence, sexual assault, suicide, trauma, and the lasting effects of childhood abuse. The prologue prepares the reader for exactly this journey, describing a life in which people “live, fall, rise, and learn,” with survival happening breath by breath.
I think what gives the collection its personality is the way the same images keep returning in different emotional forms. Light can be comfort, hope, memory, or simply proof that another day has arrived. Storms become fear, illness, anger, and uncertainty. Rivers, tides, flowers, roots, scars, doors, houses, and changing seasons appear again and again, creating a vocabulary for experiences that are sometimes difficult to name directly. The title poem captures the purpose of the collection especially well. The speaker imagines her ribs as pages and her breaths as lines, turning wounds and long-held secrets into something another person can recognize. She describes the book as an open door for someone who believes they’re fighting alone, which feels like the clearest statement of what the collection wants to accomplish.
The poems use accessible language, strong rhyme, and familiar imagery, giving the collection the feeling of someone telling you her story. Some of the most affecting pieces become powerful through concrete details: an empty chair altered by grief, a woman changing the locks after violence, someone counting a sick husband’s breaths through the night, or a child learning to recognize danger from the atmosphere inside a home. The repeated vocabulary of storms, darkness, scars, light, and rising makes many poems feel deliberately connected, almost like variations on the same emotional language. At times that repetition makes the poems blend together in rhythm and imagery, but it also reinforces the collection’s central idea that healing rarely happens once. The same memories return, get reconsidered, and acquire different meanings as a person grows older.
I’d recommend The Spine of My Soul to people who value emotionally direct poetry and who have lived through grief, complicated family relationships, illness, abuse, caregiving, or the long process of rebuilding a sense of self. It could also resonate with people who support someone carrying those experiences, because several poems pay close attention to the value of listening, staying present, and allowing another person to reclaim their own voice. The final poem, “Unlearning the Script,” is a fitting destination for the collection because it ends with the speaker actively replacing old rules about perfection, silence, appearance, and pleasing others with a kinder understanding of her own worth. She isn’t simply remembering what happened to her. She’s deciding what gets to shape her now. That makes The Spine of My Soul feel like a record of reclamation, written by someone looking directly at what formed her and choosing, poem by poem, what she wants to carry forward.
