## Recent Posts

### Violetear Books
**Kevin**  
*Jul 29*  
We've partnered with Bookshop.org to giveaway some copies of the complete Letters from Maynara series! Be sure to enter [here](https://violetear.binderybooks.com/item/uRUweM4bNnTiG0cIIAvE/) before August 7th for your chance to win.

### Violetear Books
**Kevin**  
*Jul 20*  
[Are you ready for Bird King Rising?](https://violetear.binderybooks.com/item/4e3AObNH8DLmESvfxXny/)  
Don’t miss the thrilling conclusion to the epic romantasy, Black Salt Queen.

### Violetear Books
**Kevin**  
*Jun 26*  
Hey You! Today is the last day to get 25% off Bird King Rising, the epic and devastating conclusion to Black Salt Queen!

### A Confession
#### *January 28*  
My book comes out in a few months, and I am terrified. I am scared that no one will read it. I am afraid that it is not good, but at the same time, I am afraid of what it might mean if it is.  
I worry people will not want to engage with it because it is poetry, and poetry so often carries the connotation of being confusing, structurally strange, or too intellectual for casual reading.  
And I hate that.

I am drawn to writing that is emotionally deep but simple enough to understand. Work that is not buried under fancy language just to appear complex or sophisticated. I have always said poetry is the only way I know how to take complicated emotions and turn them into something digestible.

I do not believe poetry should push people out. It should invite them in and ask them to sit with it.

My book, _The Apple of Their Throat_, is my third collection but my first traditionally published one. My first book, _Shelter_, was self published in 2018, and looking back, it makes me smile and cringe. It was written in the middle of a breakup and reads like an unfiltered emotional diary.

Then, in 2024, I self published another collection as a small passion project called _The Transformation of Fruit_. That book was more mature and more intentional, but still messy and still raw.

Over the last six years, I submitted my work for publication and was rejected again and again. I revised, restructured, rewrote, and wrote entirely new poems, all of which eventually led to _The Apple of Their Throat_. Looking back, I was not ready to be published. I do not think my writing was bad. It was just unstructured, raw, and a bit directionless.

_The Apple of Their Throat_ is a love story. To the self. To old religions. To love itself and to heartbreak. I call it a memoir in verse because, in many ways, it is. It is my life and my story, but once it is on the page, it no longer belongs to me. I would not even say it is ours. These words belong to you now.

The poems may be specific to my experience, but the emotion beneath them is universal. That is my hope, that you feel that universality when you read them.

This book is about love, heartbreak, family, queerness, selfhood, and the beliefs we internalize to find our place in the world. I fell in love with the symbolism of fruit, how it is considered the birth of sin and how queer people have been called “fruit.” And while these poems can be read in any order, they do tell a story with a full arc from the first page to the last.

I want to explain everything about this book to you, but I think now I have to let it speak for itself.