Unspoken Realm, Words from the Heart

This is a collection written from the vantage point of someone who has sat at a lot of bedsides — the author's clinical background as an APRN/DNP shows through in the authority and tenderness of poems like "Here I Lay" and "The Faithful Family," which read like a hospice nurse's benediction. That's the book's real gift: it gives language to a moment most people go through wordless, at a loved one's deathbed, and it does so with a directness that will land for its intended reader — someone grieving, or caregiving, or trying to say goodbye.

"Please no tears or sorrow, for I do not want you to be sad for me, but laugh and smile for the joy of living I have done" is the collection's clearest, most useful line — it's the kind of sentence a family reads aloud at a memorial, not a line built for a poetry seminar. Similarly, "The Faithful Family" earns its ending — "whisper sweet nothings into his ear, tell him he is loved, for these words will carry forever in his spirit" — because it's clearly observed from real bedside vigils, not imagined from a distance.

The craft is uneven — many poems repeat structural tics (anaphora, unresolved rhetorical questions, prose broken into line shapes rather than shaped for rhythm), and poems like "Who Am I?" or "The Lies Remain" tell more than they evoke. But this collection isn't chasing literary poetry's rules; it's doing grief-companion work, and on that axis — sitting with someone in loss, articulating what the dying and the grieving can't say themselves — it succeeds often enough to matter. The reader this book is for is real, and it knows exactly who they are.