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Drifts
Aaron Andreu’s Drifts is a compelling mix of street photography, poetry, personal reflections, and observations about the world. It’s a book that invites readers into the mind of an artist who finds meaning in fleeting experiences, overlooked details, and the strange contradictions of everyday life. Moving through cities such as Paris, Tokyo, Venice, Lisbon, Los Angeles, and Naples, Andreu captures scenes that might otherwise pass unnoticed. A quiet café, an empty staircase, a weathered sign, or a forgotten object becomes an opportunity to consider something larger. The photographs are interspersed with short passages that range from playful observations to pointed social commentary and deeply personal reflections. Together, they create an intimate portrait of someone who’s constantly watching, questioning, and finding inspiration in unexpected places.
Andreu has a particular eye for atmosphere, especially in places that carry a sense of history or have been touched by time. His photography moves between black and white and color, often favoring interesting textures, unusual compositions, and the small imperfections that give a place its character. There’s an appreciation for the worn, the eccentric, and the beautifully ordinary. The generous white space surrounding the images gives each photograph room to breathe, while the occasional pairing of multiple images creates interesting visual conversations. There’s also a cinematic quality to the collection, with certain photographs resembling stills from films whose stories are left for the viewer to imagine. The result feels like wandering through someone’s memories, stopping whenever something catches your attention.
Andreu’s writing brings another dimension to the experience. His voice is candid, sometimes irreverent, and often surprisingly vulnerable. He has strong opinions about art, individuality, popular culture, and the ways people present themselves to the world. Some passages are philosophical, touching on aging, creativity, love, and the passage of time. Others are deliberately provocative, filled with dry humor or a sharp observation that might make readers laugh, nod in agreement, or reconsider their own assumptions. There are also moments of genuine tenderness, particularly when he turns his attention inward. The writing has the spontaneous quality of thoughts recorded before they’ve had a chance to lose their original intensity. Some observations are more immediately affecting than others, but that variation gives the collection an unmistakably personal character. Andreu’s personality comes through on nearly every page, creating a sense of familiarity as the reader moves deeper into his world.
Drifts will appeal to readers who enjoy photography books, travel-inspired art, experimental poetry, and collections of personal musings. It’s also well suited to creative people who appreciate unconventional perspectives and have an interest in how artists interpret their surroundings. Those who enjoy discovering character in old neighborhoods, independent cafés, vintage objects, and unfamiliar streets will find plenty to connect with here. The book’s combination of humor, melancholy, curiosity, and occasional defiance makes it particularly engaging for readers who appreciate a distinct artistic personality. Its format also encourages returning to individual pages, allowing different photographs or passages to resonate depending on one’s mood or circumstances. At its heart, Drifts is a celebration of paying attention, following curiosity, and recognizing that even the smallest experiences can become meaningful when viewed through a creative lens. It’s a thoughtful, visually engaging collection that rewards readers who enjoy taking their time and seeing the world through someone else’s eyes.
Pages: 116 | ASIN : B0HGCZN7MX
All The Things I Want To Tell You: A Window Into the Life of an American High Schooler Through Poetry
C.J. Canino’s All the Things I Want to Tell You is a poetry and prose collection about growing up with a busy mind, strong feelings, and a demanding set of expectations for yourself. Written during her teenage years, it brings together reflections on friendship, first love, family, faith, and mental health, alongside responses to the dangers and injustices young people see around them. What drew me in was the tension between understanding yourself and knowing how to live with that understanding. Canino’s speakers can recognize their own patterns and still struggle to change them. They want closeness, worry about being too much, and question whether their achievements make them worthy of affection. That mix gives the collection an intimate, sometimes uncomfortable honesty. You’re reading someone trying to find words precise enough to explain feelings that keep shifting.
Canino has a knack for giving emotions bodies, personalities, and competing agendas. Fear, Joy, Sadness, and Love become creatures whose behavior makes inner conflict easier to picture. Oceans, fire, flowers, and broken glass also recur throughout the collection, creating connections between poems about very different experiences. I especially appreciated the smaller, everyday observations: remembering something a loved one wanted in a shop, noticing the comfort of a familiar sweatshirt, or finding reassurance in someone’s touch. Those details give the writing texture and make its affection feel personal. The poems move between loose rhyme and conversational free verse, often using short lines to slow down a thought or emphasize a question. There’s a directness to the voice that makes it easy to follow, even when the emotions being explored are complicated.
The collection’s intensity is both a strength and a source of repetition. Images of burning, breaking, and drowning appear frequently, and some longer poems explain feelings that their strongest images have already communicated. I found the writing most effective when Canino trusted a concrete detail or allowed a contradiction to stand without resolving it. A little more restraint in those passages would give individual lines more room to register. The prose adds a welcome change of pace and develops the relationship between religious belief, queer identity, and the desire to be loved. The closing interview and glimpses of early drafts are worthwhile additions, too. They let you see how writing fits into Canino’s life and how she uses it to examine her reactions. That context makes the book feel like an invitation to take young people’s creative work seriously.
I recommend All the Things I Want to Tell You to older teens and young adults who enjoy personal, emotionally direct poetry, particularly readers familiar with perfectionism, intense friendships, or questions about faith and sexuality. Parents and educators willing to listen closely to a teenager’s perspective could also find a lot to consider here. The collection includes explicit depictions of suicide, self-harm, sexual violence, and school shootings, so its emotional weight matters when choosing a reading audience. Alongside that distress, there’s considerable tenderness: gratitude for friends, love for family, attention to animals, and pleasure in small moments. Canino’s willingness to put all those feelings on the page is the book’s strongest quality. It gives readers plenty to recognize, question, and talk about.
Pages: 224 | ASIN : B0HLJFZCGT
Unresolved Conflicts
Love Letters & Disillusion / Cartas de Amor y Desilusión explores love after its illusions have faded, revealing what heartbreak can teach about forgiveness, memory, faith, and knowing when to let go. At what point did you recognize that these individual poems were collectively telling a larger story about your life?
The letters were written over many years. Writing has always been one of my love languages. If I love and care about someone, chances are they will eventually receive a poem or letter from me. Over time, I accumulated quite a few of these expressions of affection, but I also recognized that love wasn’t always sweetness and tenderness.
When the idea came to me to gather my love letters into a collection, I realized that I couldn’t tell the whole story without exploring disillusionment. I already had poems about heartbreak and disappointment, but I deliberately revisited certain memories to capture those experiences more fully. I even wrote a response to a poem that had once been written for me.
Only when I had captured both the tenderness and the disillusionment did I feel the collection was complete. Duality has always been central to how I understand love and life.
The collection addresses family members, friends, colleagues, lovers, and your younger self. What interested you about examining love across so many different kinds of relationships?
Love, much like life, is not linear, although we sometimes wish it were. It evolves, diminishes, grows, and transforms alongside us. The way we experience love as children is not necessarily how we understand it as adults, and the love we share with family differs from what we experience through friendship, romance, or even our relationship with ourselves.
I wanted to explore these different expressions of love because each has taught me something about who I am and who I’ve become. To capture that honestly, I had to revisit the people and experiences that shaped my understanding of love throughout my life.
Love is one of life’s greatest teachers. The people we encounter can embody its many forms, but ultimately, we ourselves are also embodiments of love.
What have you learned about yourself through revisiting relationships that once felt very different from the way you understand them now?
I’ve learned that you cannot change another person; ultimately, you can only change yourself. If you cannot accept someone for who they are, perhaps you shouldn’t be with them. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t challenge one another to grow, but when our fundamental values are incompatible, forcing the relationship will only create more suffering. Anything that’s forced is bound to break.
I’ve also come to see romantic relationships as two people’s traumas trying to coexist, sometimes even trying to dance with one another. Each person brings their own wounds, fears, experiences, and unresolved conflicts into the relationship. The challenge is learning how to navigate those internal struggles while confronting the external challenges of loving another person.
In many ways, romantic love becomes an attempt to find harmony between two people who are still learning how to find peace within themselves.
What do you hope bilingual readers experience as they move between the English and Spanish versions?
Above all, I hope they experience connection. Whether someone reads my work in English or Spanish, my intention remains the same: to reach another person through words. Readers don’t have to agree with everything I write, but if they recognize themselves in even one poem, then I feel I’ve accomplished what I set out to do.
For bilingual readers, I hope there’s an additional layer of appreciation in experiencing how the same poem can evoke different emotions depending on the language. Although the meaning may remain consistent, the rhythm, musicality, and emotional weight of certain words can change considerably between English and Spanish. One version might resonate more deeply with a reader than the other.
Translation has always been an interesting creative challenge for me because some expressions simply don’t carry the same beauty or emotional force when translated literally. A direct translation might preserve the meaning but diminish the poetry.
For me, the process becomes a balancing act between remaining faithful to the original message and preserving the musicality and emotional depth of the work. Ultimately, I want both languages to offer readers an authentic poetic experience.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Amazon
Este segundo libro continúa el recorrido iniciado en su obra anterior, nacida desde la apertura y la creencia, y avanza hacia una voz más atenta al discernimiento y al autodominio. Lejos de idealizar el amor o dramatizar la pérdida, Garcia lo aborda como un proceso vivido, uno que enseña, templa y deja huella.
En su obra, el bilingüismo no es decorativo sino esencial. El inglés permite distancia y contemplación; el español sostiene la intimidad, el cuerpo y la memoria afectiva. Ambas lenguas conforman una sola voz que negocia la vulnerabilidad sin rendirse y la ternura sin ilusiones.
Love Letters & Disillusion / Cartas de Amor y Desilusión se escribe desde el después, después de que la creencia ha sido puesta a prueba y la claridad se ha asentado. No es un rechazo del amor, sino un reconocimiento de su costo y de aquello que aún vale la pena conservar.
Love Letters & Disillusion / Cartas de Amor y Desilusión
Abraham Garcia’s Love Letters & Disillusion / Cartas de Amor y Desilusión gathers poems that speak directly to the people who’ve shaped a life: a mother, a sister, friends, colleagues, lovers, and the younger self. That range gives the collection its emotional foundation. In “A Mother’s Love” and “A Sister’s Forgiveness,” affection comes with apologies and an awareness that care has a cost. “Leader” and “New Beginnings” extend that care into work with young people and families, showing how love can become encouragement, service, and a reason to grow. The mother’s reply in “A Mother’s Only Son” is an especially welcome turn. For a moment, the person writing so many letters becomes their recipient, and we hear the worry and devotion surrounding him.
The English and Spanish poems appear on facing pages, giving readers two ways to enter each relationship. Reading across them, you can hear shifts in rhythm and emphasis: the English of “300 Miles” stretches into elaborate promises, while the Spanish moves through a quicker sequence of intimate questions. Throughout the book, Garcia favors direct address, familiar speech, and repeated openings. In “Even Though,” repetition allows affection to persist through distance and uncertainty. In “Anxiety,” the same device piles up pressures until the closing appeal for a friend’s relief feels earned. Flowers, sunlight, skin, and the sea provide a recurring vocabulary for attraction and renewal. The poems are easy to follow, and their conversational delivery makes them feel addressed to someone specific.
The second section changes the emotional temperature. Biblical and mythological figures, including Lilith and Medusa, turn romantic disappointment into stories of temptation, conflict, and escape. Faith anchors the speaker’s search for order, while his commitment to traditional gender roles gives several poems a stern, judging voice. There’s a revealing tension between “Temporary,” which recognizes that people can’t be owned, and poems that connect romantic harmony with a woman’s submission. At times, the speaker’s account of another person’s trauma becomes an accusation, making his tenderness feel conditional. That tension matters to the reading experience: we’re hearing someone who wants clarity while still carrying anger. “Lie to Me” is particularly effective here, because its repeated invitation exposes how willingly desire can cooperate with the deception the speaker condemns elsewhere.
What really resonated with me were the moments when memory unsettles the speaker’s certainty. “Tattoo” returns to touch, silence, and the knowledge that two people can matter deeply to each other while being unable to meet each other’s needs. Its echo of “Another Life” connects the collection’s two halves, letting an earlier romantic hope survive in a sadder form. “Letter to Myself” also gives the book a useful sense of proportion, placing love alongside family, education, past mistakes, and the continuing work of managing destructive impulses. Garcia’s strongest poems make room for that unfinished work. They give this bilingual collection its personal weight and its most persuasive reason to keep reading. Garcia gives heartbreak a voice that can bless, accuse, and still ache for the person it’s trying to release.
Pages: 132 | ISBN : 6316688369
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
