Lessons in Leaves

Lessons in Leaves is a memoir-in-poems that traces the quiet collapse and recovery of a young woman’s world in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic: the sudden dismantling of a childhood home, the scattering of family across the country, the heartbreak of painful love, and the pleading resistance to a life that was changing too fast to process. In these poems, her memories becomes compost. What was lost—home, love, certainty—slowly feeds a new self. From Ohio to Arizona, from grief to growth, this collection tells a story of early adulthood transformation.