from a tree
like a seed”
When I am clean
About the book...
A long arc written across twenty-six years, When I am clean traces the slow movement from fracture toward wholeness. These poems do not observe life from a distance. They arise from within it, written in the midst of confusion, collapse, endurance, and return. The voice evolves across time, at moments stripped bare and unguarded, at others quiet and steady, always searching for ground that can be inhabited rather than escaped.
The collection moves through inner weather: dissociation, memory, grief, longing, and the difficult work of remaining present when the self feels close to vanishing. There are nights of disorientation, stretches of silence, and passages where identity loosens and reforms under pressure. Language becomes more than expression. It becomes continuity, a thin but unbroken thread holding the self together across years that might otherwise have dissolved into fragments. What emerges is not a story of rescue, but a record of persistence, the slow and often painful re-entering of one's own life.
Beneath the surface of struggle runs a quieter current. The poems circle questions of innocence and rupture, of contamination and cleansing, of what remains when illusion falls away. Suffering is neither dramatized nor denied. It is endured, witnessed, and gradually transformed. Darkness here is not an end but a passage, a descent through which perception sharpens and something more essential begins to speak.
Across the years, a subtle shift takes place. The struggle does not disappear, but the relationship to it changes. Where there was once only survival, the possibility of integration begins to appear. Moments of clarity arrive without ceremony, simple, almost fragile, yet unmistakable, revealing a self that was never entirely lost, only buried beneath silence and time.
When I am clean does not seek to impress or console. It remains close to what is real. What endures is the recognition that healing is not a single moment of transformation, but a return, again and again, to presence, to truth, and to the fragile, resilient continuity of being. Beneath the broken places, something lives. And slowly, across years, it learns to speak.
