Poetry chapbook, Cactus Press, 2024

People Are Metaphors and Goodbyes examines the complicated emotional terrain of intimacy, separation, and loss. Moving between dark humor and moments of quiet reflection, the poems explore how people try to understand love after it changes form — after betrayal, absence, or death.

Some poems trace the aftermath of relationships, where memory and language struggle to account for what has happened. Others turn toward larger questions about gender, power, and the stories society tells about women’s bodies and desires. Still others reflect on grief, including the loss of a partner to suicide and the fragile ways survivors attempt to make sense of it.

Throughout the chapbook, everyday objects and moments — a kitchen drawer emptied of spoons, a subway platform, a house fire imagined in a dream — become metaphors for the mathematics of love and survival. Taken together, the poems consider how language, memory, and metaphor help us endure the difficult task of saying goodbye.