HOPES AND FEARS
AND POEMS THAT SPEAK TO THEM
From 2019 to 2023, through one of the most chaotic eras in modern history, Isaac Marion (author of the New York Times bestselling WARM BODIES series) invited his readers to send him their hopes and fears.
Illness. Loss. Uncertainty. The nervous dance of new love. The dangerous allure of solitude. Depression, self-doubt, the flow of time, the sleeping and breathing of everything—how do we do it?
Here are 26 anonymous confessions and 26 poems in response, each one illustrated by the author. They are simple things, written by a poetry outsider in conversational language, stealing ideas from babies, animals, weather patterns, outer space, and psychedelic experience—not to provide “answers" but to ask the questions together, fumbling in the dark, yearning in the direction of daylight.