"TILT" is here

My debut collection of poetry on surviving Long Covid, healing and living with chronic illness is available

Dear readers,

First, I want to say thank you. Your support in this process means everything. I took some time off Substack to return to work in political journalism and, of course, to finish this collection. It’s finally here!

It’s currently available for purchase on Amazon, Kelsay Books, and even the option for a signed copy from yours truly.

As I hold the book in my hand, I still cannot believe it came to fruition. I am so thankful to those who helped me edit it (Aaron and Agnes, you are amazing) and those who took the time to review it (Agnes, Stephanie, and Leta, thank you).

I can’t help but think about how the words got here.

The sofa. The bed. The chair. The lounge chair in the backyard. Back to the sofa. Back to the bed.

For years that was my world. That’s where this collection came from. I’d lay on my living room couch with a candle lit, spinning, tilting. I was in the depths of my Long Covid recovery. My brain, foggy. My fatigue, a lead suit I carried with me each hour. My lungs, tight and crushing. My balance, off—quite off. Yet in the early morning hours of the morning in fall of 2022, when my body would wake around 4am, I started typing.

Write it down, I kept thinking, hearing, sensing. But how? My brain was a soggy bowl of cereal left out for days. I could barely function, much less write a book, I thought. And plus, how could I describe a feeling, a symptom? How to write about such grief and disappointment? How could I tackle such a task when I could barely follow an entire movie, where looking at a screen provoked a battery acid-like pain and the room tilted more as each hour passed? How to put language to loss, trauma?

It started with a few lines at a time, then full poems. In fact, the majority of this collection was written through a my iPhone’s keyboard on the universal “Notes” app. After a few weeks, I had a dozen poems. Then, two dozen. I kept typing.

Metaphor. I thought back to my early doctor’s appointments in 2020.

“An electric current.”

“A gravitational pull.”

“A dreamlike fog.”

“A hollow dread.”

They were all symbols to help someone else understand a feeling.

As in, Stream, I soon discovered it came rushing out of me, “words came pouring out, books flipping off a shelf, tumbling into a pile of knowing.” I let them pour. I covered it all: The ugly, the desperate, the grotesque, the rage, the shameful, the fear, the courage, the healing. Chronic illness patients know these are the things we must constantly grapple with.

I hope those disabled by Long Covid and/or chronic illness can find solace in TILT. As each day adds up and our disability wears on us, knowing we are not alone can be a small comfort. It has been for me.

And I decided that if I was going to write a collection about what I saw during the pandemic, in my own body, among friends, inside the four walls of my childhood and then my own home, I’d do it with truth and vulnerability.

It wasn’t pretty to bear witness to it—from the confines inside it or I’m sure from the helpless ones around me. But in this collection, my promise to my reader is that I captured exactly what happened.

I am so proud to put that out into the world.