Before It Is Understood

Before It Is Understood is a poetry collection for the ache that arrives before language. Tender, contemplative, and quietly unflinching, these poems move through grief, trauma, memory, faith, and the slow return to self. They honor what the body carries in silence—the sorrow, the survival, the unnamed places where healing often begins before it can be explained. With language both raw and reverent, Gaisma DeGroote writes toward the sacred work of becoming—of finding a voice after years of burial, of returning to the self not untouched, but alive.