Before Love Takes Form, There Is Mud 

I didn’t set out to write a book about pottery. I set out to write about the men who tried to reshape me, the version of myself I kept soft and workable for far too long, and the slow, unglamorous process of becoming someone who holds her own shape. It just turned out clay already had a language for all of it.

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Clay is structured around the actual stages of pottery. Because transformation was never a single moment for me, it was a process, and most of it happened in stages I didn’t recognize until I was already through them.

Dry clay. Who you are before anyone’s hands have touched you yet.

The wheel. The dizzying spin of new love. Hope and disorientation, spinning at the same speed.

Daily writing prompt

What’s the longest trip you’ve ever taken?

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Leather-hard. That strange middle stage where you’ve been shaped by someone, and you’re not sure anymore which parts are you and which parts are the shape of their hands.

Bone dry. Learning, slowly, to hold your own shape without anyone’s hands on you at all.

Moreover

Bisque firing. The heat. The part nobody warns you about. That becoming permanent requires fire first.

Glaze. What’s left. Sealed, finished, and if you look closely at the cracks… gold.

Finally, every poem in this collection lives in one of these stages. Some are about the men who tried to reshape me. Some are about the version of myself I kept workable, just in case someone needed me softer. All of them are about the moment I realized I was never just the clay in this story.

I was always the potter.

If you’ve read Rupi Kaur, Warsan Shire, or Cleo Wade and underlined half the book without meaning to. I think you already know the shape of this one too.

Clay is available now on Amazon 

And if it’s already sitting on your shelf or in your Kindle library: a review, even one honest line, is how the next reader who needs this book actually finds it. Poetry doesn’t move through algorithms the way other books do. It moves through people telling other people.

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