Leaving

This is a contemporary poetry collection for adult readers, built around the most pressing reality of our time—the coronavirus pandemic—while also touching memories of distant conflict. The central theme is how crisis reshapes memory, meaning, and mortality, inviting reflection rather than escape. The intended reader is anyone who seeks a thoughtful, quiet encounter with current events through lyric language. The emotional tone is introspective, elegiac, and ultimately hopeful. The content unfolds as a cohesive sequence of lyric poems that begin in a sunlit garden and gradually move through history into the present crisis. German artist Max Neumann’s haunting images accompany the poems, creating a powerful dialogue between text and image that deepens the reader’s experience. The reading journey feels hushed and contemplative, encouraging slow, attentive reading and repeated revisits to let the themes reveal themselves. For readers, the experience offers a unified, almost cinematic journey—between past and present, desolation and beauty, nostalgia and mortality. The poems and illustrations work in concert to produce intricate metaphors that reward patience and reflection, inviting you to inhabit a space where grief and grace converse. Though centered on global events, the work remains intimate, accessible in its language, and deliberately spare in its revelations. - A cohesive s