Poems and essays for ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief. Barefoot Through Brambles is for the grief people carry in plain sight: the losses that arrive without clean names, easy comfort, or neat endings. Betrayal, divorce, a diagnosis, estrangement, the future that went missing while you held the rest together, the person still alive but gone in the way that mattered. These pages give shape to the part that usually gets edited out, swallowed, laughed off, or filed under "I'm fine."
It does not reach for the tidy comfort that insults the size of the thing. It stays where the loss actually lives: in the body, in the ordinary day, in the sentence you stopped halfway through.
I wrote these on the nights nothing on the shelf had anything to say to me. I am not going to tell you it lifts on a schedule. They are the pieces that got me through some hard nights, and I am handing them over in case you are having a few of your own.
The book moves in three parts, from the reaching that won't stop, through the weight of staying upright, to living with the scar instead of pretending it healed clean.
If someone you love is in it, this is the thing to hand them when there is nothing to say. It will not pretend to fix anything. It just refuses to leave them alone in it.
For the nights the usual words run out.
