17 years. 18 poems.
All poets have an essence—an image or feeling every poem finds their way back to. Essence is something discovered and rediscovered with each stanza, a kind of pulse beating between the lines.
Essence is something that just bleeds naturally onto the page, sometimes obviously, sometimes not. The essence of a poet reflects the core of their experiences, who they are.
As a teenager bordering on technical adulthood, I find myself reaching back to my early childhood. My poems center around memory and family and most importantly, nostalgia.
Nostalgia is my essence. This chapbook aims to capture the feeling of growing up: how we all have to keep some branches and prune the others, how time pushes us up and forwards. We tend to cut out the memories, try to capture the lost and precious from childhood meals to card games. In other words: our lives imitate trees the same way poetry imitates growth.
