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A Confession

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. At the time, I was trying to emulate what I would call Instagram poets. I did not understand structure or line breaks, but I knew what I felt and I tried to translate that as honestly as I could.

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. With The Apple of Their Throat, I found what I wanted to say, how to say it, and how to do so in a way that respected my ethos of what poetry can be.

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.

A Confession: The Hardest Lesson I’ve Had to Learn Online

I am not morally pure, no matter how hard I try to be. But what most people don’t see — or don’t want to see — is how much I care. I care about doing what is right. I care about making people happy. I care about standing up for others. I question myself constantly because I want to get it right.

The internet scares me. I’ve seen how your character can be dragged, twisted, and flattened into something easy for others to digest. I’ve read some of the nastiest things said about me.

But all of this forced me to face my greatest fear: being misunderstood.

I became a book creator because queer books saved me when I was coming out, and I wanted to share that gift.

I am here because I believe in diversity in our stories, and that is what I will continue to publish.

Thank you. Truly. Your willingness to sit with these thoughts means more than I can say.

Does Reading a Book Like Alchemised Make You Complicit?

But paradoxically, the louder we are about condemning them, the more oxygen we give to that connection. What is meant to discourage engagement can end up amplifying it.

If we knew for certain that Rowling does not profit from these books, would that change how we view them?

What about those who choose to read them anyway? Does their choice say something about their values, or is it simply one of many complicated ways people navigate a world where art and artist are often entangled?

I do not have a clean answer. Maybe the more important work is asking these questions at all, and allowing ourselves to wrestle with what they mean for us.