This week, I found myself staring into the past—and it stared right back. After pouring out fresh words during the NAPOWRIMO challenge in April, I shifted gears to revisit something old: a tattered notebook filled with poems I wrote over twenty years ago. As I work through the pages of that ancient text, I am surprised to find how my voice has changed. The themes and subjects are unchanged, but I feel that the voice of my poems has evolved. My early poems are raw, bursting with unfiltered emotion—sometimes chaotic, sometimes clumsy. Today’s voice feels different: more deliberate, like a stew that’s had time to simmer. Seasoned, in more ways than one. Both sets of words are important to me, and they both will be represented in my upcoming collections. Even as my voice has matured, the themes remain hauntingly familiar—loneliness, doubt, the sense of never quite belonging. It’s sobering to realize I’ve been carrying these same emotional burdens for decades. That enduring struggle in...
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