Learning to Swim...Again. - Jane Louise

This collection was not written in a straight line. The poems move through love and its aftermath - through closeness, distance, memory, and the quiet reshaping that follows loss. Some were written in moments of clarity, others in confusion. Many return to the same feelings from different angles, as if circling something that resists a single name.

There is no single story here, and no fixed beginning or end. What connects these pages is not a sequence of events, but a shared emotional landscape - one that shifts, contradicts, and, at times, softens.

If there is a thread, it is this: that love and grief are not opposites, but echoes of one another. Each leaves its mark in ways that are often difficult to explain, and perhaps better felt than understood.

These poems are offered without instruction. You are invited to enter them wherever you find yourself, and to take from them what feels true to you.