I've always found poetry to be a cathartic release: a way to spill all my thoughts and feelings into all my filled, beat-up composition notebooks. You may not relate to all of the imagery of every poem and take away different meanings from them than I had intended when writing them and all of this is okay. We've all experienced heartbreak, whether a breakup, estrangement from or loss of a family moment, etc. and we all experience and heal from it differently. The experiences translated through emotion onto paper were how I healed from them. My hope for this collection is that the people who read these poems will find similar healing as I did in writing them. -JRE