Anxious Attachment

In Anxious Attachment, Shanaya Stephens maps the quiet architecture of loving someone more than they let you show it — the clawclip kept as proof of a memory, the food made just a little more careful so they'll stay a moment longer, the arms that hold you only on the condition that you don't ask for more. Across nineteen poems moving from infatuation to devotion to a hard-won kind of waking up, Stephens writes hunger as a love language, and silence as its quiet cost. Spoken-word in cadence and confessional in nerve, this collection is for anyone who has fed someone else's need and called it love — and is only now learning the difference between being chosen and being kept.