Hello friends, today is very exciting because I’m officially announcing the pre-order of my first book. 

Natural Shape is an 80 page book of illustrated poems. The poems in this project go all the way back to 2019 but are mostly from the last 3.5 years since my divorce. I used poetry during a lot of change in my life as a tool to process how I was feeling which can be difficult for me. In crisis I tend to disassociate and struggle to know how I actually feel about something. On walks with my dog, in a quiet moment of inspiration I would pull out my notes app on my phone and jot down some thoughts. 

Over time I ended up with over a hundred little poems. While I haven’t studied poetry academically ever, I have been writing songs for over 20 years and really have enjoyed a different angle of looking at words without music. 

At some point over the last two years I was wondering what to do with all these poems, if I should do something with them at all. I had submitted a few to poetry journals and got some nice feedback but quickly realized that process was a bit too regimented for my personality. Being fully independent for as long as I have been, has spoiled me and I think I’ve become an outright artistic anarchist. 😂

As a big fan of poetry and collector or poetry books, I have always been draw to William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. The combination of illustrations and lettering is so beautiful. I’ve always wondered, why aren’t more poems published this way? Well, here I am…an illustrator with a bunch of poems.

Two years later I finally finished this little creature. 80 pages, 33 poems, many many hours of drawing. 🙂

This poem, Natural Shape, I wrote in a moment of deep grief and transition. It came to me as an image of what my life could be like and feel like. A way to imagine a path forward.

I will also have copies at Markets after May 20th!