Born

This poetry collection documents the things modern life has learned to tolerate: violence without pause, inequality without outrage, debt without escape, bodies without privacy, relationships without permanence, empathy without action. It interrogates the systems and habits we've been told are inevitable—and asks what they cost us, quietly, over time. These poems are rooted in the real world: extreme wealth concentration beside mass poverty, medical and student debt as lifelong restraints, environmental contamination embedded in human bodies, children growing up surveilled, grief medicalized, cruelty normalized, sincerity ridiculed. They refuse metaphor where facts are sharper, and refuse comfort where honesty is truer. Written in a stark, documentary lyric style, this collection does not offer redemption arcs or tidy conclusions. It does not reassure. It bears witness. This book is for readers who are tired of performative empathy, tired of optimism used as erasure, tired of being told that adaptation is the same thing as survival. It is for those who want language for what they feel but have not been able to name—anger without spectacle, sorrow without apology, clarity without consolation. This is a record of what hurts, and what we've been told to accept as normal.