A Woman In Four Parts

A Woman in Four Parts is a poetry chapbook that explores the deepest parts of a woman’s identity, categorized by vital organs of the body: The Gut, The Lungs, The Heart, and The Mind. Each section details the wide array of conflicting emotions attached to human experience as a child is thrust into womanhood. Within those segments, poems reflect on individual experiences while working with the others to create a mosaic of truth intent to arrive at the destination of acceptance and self-love. A Woman in Four Parts means, above all else, to allow the release of emotions we carry within us and deeply move the soul while recognizing our connections to nature, each other, and our past.

Created from blood, sweat, and lots of tears, the chapbook started as an undergrad assignment. The mission was simple: write a poetry collection that embodies the emotions and experiences that create us and drive our choices. Our pasts don’t define us, but they do change us. Through several revisions and meltdowns, this collection morphed into something else again and again and again. Even the final version seems to shift perspective before the readers’ eyes; a living, breathing poetic being, birthed “in the wood/among the petrichor/and the folly of a foolish man” on the first page.

Leaving home is never easy, but what is ‘home’ if not the place our souls are born? Can we ever really leave something that is such a huge part of us? These questions, and more about the formation of identity and the chrysalis we go through many times throughout our lives, are asked and contemplated over this series of wild words. A journey inward that some may find not linear, but cyclical.