I was in a coffee shop when my phone showed the first sale notification. I ordered a second coffee I didn't need and sat there for forty-five minutes doing nothing in particular except feeling things I don't have a clean word for. Gratitude, maybe, but also something older and stranger — the particular vertigo of having said something out loud that you've been carrying quietly for years.
A book is a long conversation with people you'll never meet. It's the hope that something true in you will find something true in them, across whatever distance of time and circumstance exists between you. That's the bet every writer makes. That week, I felt the bet pay off in the best possible way. It was not in the small monetory reward, but of the hope my words, in so small way reflect in someone else in the world. My cousin Donna was the first one to purchase my first book.
The release week did something strange to time. For years the book had lived in one register only: mine. Drafts on screens, revisions in drafts, lines carried privately until they were strong enough to go public. Then suddenly there were notifications, orders, messages, people I did not know holding a copy of something that had spent so long inside my own head that it almost still felt private. That shift is exhilarating, but it is also disorienting. A book launch is not just celebration. It is an identity adjustment.
I kept thinking about the risk built into publication. Writing the poems is one risk. Letting them go is another. Once a book is out, readers begin finishing the sentences in ways you never could have planned. They find themselves in different lines than the ones you expected. They tell you a section mattered because of something you had almost cut. They carry the work into rooms you will never enter. That is the real miracle of a book week, I think. Not sales on a screen, though I am grateful for those too. The miracle is that the private conversation becomes shared reality and does not lose its tenderness in the exchange.
Unveiled
Do you glimpse me through the gaps, In the barriers I've wrapped. Guarding self from hurt and woe, Pushing you yet can't let go.
Read it in Echoes From the Heart →That is why the week felt bigger than achievement alone. It felt like exposure in the most generous sense. The book was no longer proof that I had written it. It had become evidence that readers were willing to meet it. Every writer hopes for that. Very few of us stop being astonished when it actually happens. I certainly have not. I still think a first sale notification in a coffee shop deserves a second coffee and a little stunned silence.
Unveiled is the right poem for that week because release is its own form of unveiling. Not dramatic confessional exposure, but the gentler and riskier act of allowing other people to see what you made without staying there to manage their response. October 2024 taught me again that vulnerability is not a phase you outgrow in a writing life. It is the medium. The book came out, readers came toward it, and for one remarkable week I got to feel the whole exchange happening in real time. That belongs in the record exactly as it was: unnerving, grateful, and deeply alive.
I also want the record to keep the ordinary details because those are what made the week feel real instead of ceremonial. Answering messages between errands. Refreshing a page more often than dignity should probably permit. Hearing from readers who knew parts of my life and from readers who only knew the book but somehow recognized me anyway. Publication week is made of those small crossings between solitude and recognition. The poems left my desk, but they did not leave my life. They simply began returning to me through other people's language, and that is one of the strangest gifts writing offers.
If you've read the book: thank you. Genuinely. You're why this work exists.