21 Shades of Life

21 Shades of Life: An Emotive Unboxing is not an attempt to define life. It is an attempt to feel it—one shade at a time. The twenty-one poems gathered here emerged from different emotional landscapes: moments of tenderness and turbulence, memories that refused to disappear, silences that became heavier than words, relationships that changed their shape, wounds that taught something, and hopes that survived even when they had very little reason to. I chose the word “unboxing” because emotions, much like forgotten belongings, are often stored away. We put them aside because life demands that we move forward. We tell ourselves that we will return to them someday.