For those of you who follow me on social media, hopefully this news is not too surprising (or that means my advertising skills need work). Tomorrow, my first poetry collection "I Hold my Hands Together Without Weeping," will be available on Amazon!
There are so many things that I could say about this book and the journey that I've been through writing it, but I also don't want to end up rambling, so I'll cut this into sections:
About the book
My writing process
What this book means to me
The poem that inspired the title
About the Book
I've been writing this book for around 3 years now, and it is comprised of some of my favorite poems written for social media, in my creative writing classes at FIU, and things that I've written on my own. This collection is a mix of "lust, love, and loneliness" as the back cover states. This is the best short and sweet description I could give, but it is much more than this. I talk about my experiences in college, want, depression, sexual abuse, heartbreak, insecurity, love, sexuality, and everything in between. It is something that is very personal, but hopefully (in some ways) relatable.
My Writing Process
I think that, after writing poetry on social media for so long, and really getting into poetry during my college classes, I decided that I wanted to write a book that was vulnerable. I am not a particularly emotional person, so this book is supposed to be a piece of my soul for the whole world to see. I started writing this book after taking an Introduction to Poetry class, where I wrote poetry I didn't think I was capable of writing. I found that it was an outlet, a way to speak freely in metaphors that people could dissect and understand. I also enjoyed reading the work of others and learning their different writing styles.
When I first started compiling poetry for this book, it was from countless Google Documents of poetry that I'd written over a few years. I started piecing together poems that I liked that were unfinished, and the process became very interesting and fun as I developed my own style. In the end, I didn't plan for there to be a central theme. It seems like the book wrote that all by itself. I spent countless hours reading, editing, re-reading, and editing some more before I finally got the finished product.
What This Book Means to Me
This book gives me a lot of mixed feelings. At first, I was anxious about the thought of people reading something I treated so preciously. That anxious feeling later turned into excitement, and then impatience. I went from having stomach aches thinking about this book being out, to having butterflies. I want as many people as possible to read this, and hopefully enjoy, but I also don't mind if it doesn't perform as well as I want it to. I think that, as my writing grows, this will be something I will look back on with a smile, knowing that I put my everything into a project.
The Poem That Inspired the Title
There is nothing exceptional about this particular poem. The title for this poem just happened to catch my eye, and I thought to myself that such a simple line says so much. So please enjoy this poem, and hopefully, my book :)
I hold my hands together without weeping
because what good will tears do me in a
moment like this? I became an expert at
hide and seek, stuffing my emotions into
a cupboard with a finger against my lips.
I hold my breath between bouts of
unexpected anger, without a prayer, and
with a blind eye to all but Patience, her
immortal smile hushing all of the emotions
that try to scatter as I count down.
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