I Stayed Soft

What does it cost a woman to stay soft in a world built to break her?

Tiny shards of broken mirror. Angry things that claw at ribs held together with needle and thread. Things sent to make her bitter, angry, and hard: all held at bay by a beating heart that stood at a crossroad and chose to stay soft.

I Stayed Soft is a poetry collection that moves through five reckonings — Silence, Fire, Softening, Return, Becoming — tracing what it costs a woman to remain open in a world built to close her. These are poems about rage that refuses to calcify into cruelty, a body relearning comfort and pleasure after trauma, and the quiet, radical choice to stay tender when everything demands otherwise.

For readers of Rupi Kaur, Nikita Gill, and Amanda Lovelace, but sharper-edged. Unafraid of the dark, or the flesh that carries us through this world.

This is not a collection about surviving.

It's about what you can become on the other side of survival: loving, sovereign, and in control of your fire.