Scarlet Retrograde: Heart Poems
My Second Collection of Poems is Here
We have all been there, that place in your mind where you get stuck and can’t seem to shake the contemplation. Or maybe there is a dark emotion trapped in your subconscious. Maybe you need your voice to be heard, or to clarify a perspective on a situation, but can’t get past your emotions. Perhaps there is a situation you want to change but it’s out of your hands. Or you’ve had a peculiar realization that makes you wonder how and why things are the way they are. Especially when it comes to your observations of the wider world.
In these moments, we feel as if we’re slipping backwards into some strange abyss, or a purgatory of illusions. I curated poems for this collection that carry the dark, strange, and heavy side of contemplation (mostly).
I am pretty good at shifting myself out of those phases these days, but I definitely get stuck within sadness and grief. There are major losses I haven’t even written about yet because I still can’t find the words. Maybe someday! But for now, this is my offering:
Scarlet Retrograde: Heart Poems is here in paperback and Kindle format 🪐♥️🦋
I made the artwork for the cover in 2018, and have had the title and concept together since then. Curating poems is a difficult task. If you’re a poet or writer reading this, I know you understand — we write so much, and hate so much of it 😂
You might read back over lines and turn them into full poems. You might take a section of a crappy poem and write a new poem around it. You might revise a poem 20x and decide to throw the whole thing out. It’s a process that I have had a strange affection for most of my life. I have been writing verse since I was 9 or 10, after sneaking into my Grandfather’s office and peeking through his many books, although my Grandma taught me the rhythm for limericks when I was younger and I would play around with those for fun. My first limerick was about a unicorn 🦄. So it’s a bit surreal to be finally releasing poems into the world, a second time at that!
Scarlet Retrograde is my second collection of poetry, and it’s the melancholic companion to For Hearts of the Wilder Kind: Poems From Appalachia.
I hope you love them both.
