Hold On

For readers who treasure both poetry and art, this book is an immersive journey - a gallery of feelings captured in verse. Hold On is a collection of lyrical reflections on the turmoil of loneliness, loss, wonder, and resilience.

What do you do when the life you've lived-your songs, your poems, your proof-disappears? Years after a home break-in stole thousands of pages of writing and recordings, the author opened a forgotten green folder and found a handful of poems and song lyrics written between ages twelve and twenty-seven. Unedited. Unvarnished. Unafraid.

This collection is a time capsule of a young person learning how to breathe through grief, teaching oneself to speak on paper when the world punished them for feeling. The poems were never revised for elegance or hindsight; they appear here exactly as they were first written: raw, jagged, tender, sometimes furious, always honest. Together they create a memoir-in-verse that moves from the claustrophobia of loneliness to the oxygen of endurance.

The through-line is simple and profound: writing can save a life. In these pages, you'll meet a voice that kept itself alive by telling the truth when truth had no safe place to live. You'll hear what it sounds like to stand with one foot at the edge and still choose the page; to be told your feelings are "too much" and still refuse to go silent. The result is not a sanitized narrative, only evidence that you can outlast the dark.

The recovered-folder origin gives this book an urgency you can feel - a second chance. You will find lines that echo long after the page-reminders that strength isn't loud, healing isn't linear, and hope often speaks in a whisper that says simply: Hold on.

Why this book:
Because these poems weren't written to impress; they were written to survive. Because the ones that remained did so against the odds. And because in reading them, you may recognize your own younger self and feel, perhaps for the first time, that you were never alone.