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Instructions for Traveling West: Poems
A vivid and inspiring poetry collection about what’s possible when we heed our instincts and honor our intuition, allowing ourselves to strike out for new territories of love, pleasure, and peace.
First, you must realize you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living. Then, you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming apart.
So begins Joy Sullivan’s Instructions for Traveling West —a lush debut collection that examines what happens when we leave home and leap into the deep unknown. Mid-pandemic, Sullivan left the man she planned to marry, sold her house, quit her corporate job, and drove west. This dazzling collection tells that story as it illuminates the questions haunting us What possible futures lie on the horizon? What happens when we heed the call of furious reinvention?
A book for anyone flinging themselves into fresh starts, Instructions for Traveling West grapples with loss, loneliness and belonging. These poems teach us that naming our desire is profound alchemy. Each of us holds the power to set our own course forward.
Expansive and heart-opening—exquisite in their specificity, galvanizing in their scope—the poems in Instructions for Traveling West speak to the longing that lives within us all. They remind us that “joy is not a trick.”
First, you must realize you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living. Then, you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming apart.
So begins Joy Sullivan’s Instructions for Traveling West —a lush debut collection that examines what happens when we leave home and leap into the deep unknown. Mid-pandemic, Sullivan left the man she planned to marry, sold her house, quit her corporate job, and drove west. This dazzling collection tells that story as it illuminates the questions haunting us What possible futures lie on the horizon? What happens when we heed the call of furious reinvention?
A book for anyone flinging themselves into fresh starts, Instructions for Traveling West grapples with loss, loneliness and belonging. These poems teach us that naming our desire is profound alchemy. Each of us holds the power to set our own course forward.
Expansive and heart-opening—exquisite in their specificity, galvanizing in their scope—the poems in Instructions for Traveling West speak to the longing that lives within us all. They remind us that “joy is not a trick.”
160 pages, Paperback
Published April 9, 2024
238 people are currently reading
11460 people want to read
About the author
Joy Sullivan
2 books162 followersJoy Sullivan is a poet, teacher, and author of the national bestseller Instructions for Traveling West.
She received a Masters in poetry from Miami University and has served as the poet-in-residence for the Wexner Center for the Arts. Her work has appeared in places like Goop, Oprah Daily, and The Sunday Paper among many others.
In addition to leading international writing retreats, Joy has guest-lectured in classrooms from Stanford University to Florida International University and is the founder of Sustenance, a community designed to help writers revitalize and nourish their craft. Read her thoughts on the creative life in her Substack newsletter, Necessary Salt.
She received a Masters in poetry from Miami University and has served as the poet-in-residence for the Wexner Center for the Arts. Her work has appeared in places like Goop, Oprah Daily, and The Sunday Paper among many others.
In addition to leading international writing retreats, Joy has guest-lectured in classrooms from Stanford University to Florida International University and is the founder of Sustenance, a community designed to help writers revitalize and nourish their craft. Read her thoughts on the creative life in her Substack newsletter, Necessary Salt.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 708 reviews
May 14, 2024
I have a love/love relationship with this book. Love it because I wrote it. Love it because I lived it. Hope you love it too.
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September 19, 2024
This collection is an absolute marvel. Joy Sullivan transforms words into shining light like a North Star of poetry for us to navigate our emotional journeys through the dark nights of life. Instructions for Traveling West, Sullivan’s debut collection that has long appeared in pieces across social media as a comforting delight to many, reminds us of the power of poetry to confront hard times and hard feelings and encourage us to carry on and ask ourselves ‘what parts did you siphon / into honey?’ Though there is no better introduction than her own words on why poetry is such an important art to draw deeply into your heart:
Why Read Poetry if It Won't Make You Rich?
For starters, your soul will get bigger.
Your love, more terrible and luminous.
Soon, you'll say tender things at parties
after too much champagne. A sidewalk
quince, wet with midnight, will stop
you in your tracks. In time, you'll
find the perfect metaphor for your
child's face. All at once, you'll see
the world and want it again:
clothes flapping on the line,
lilacs strewn and seeding, the luck
of worms. An artichoke with its heart
torn hot and steaming from the throbbing
crown will suddenly turn you on.
Joy Sullivan’s Instructions for Traveling West is about wanting the world even at its worst, about seeking joy and not being afraid to take it, about wanting ‘love that asks to eat you whole,’ and being so consumed with beauty that you want to let that light shine from you endlessly. ‘I want more time,’ she writes, ‘I want to waste my love on everything.’ The poems were forged in the struggles of life to seek such beauty and Sullivan has written and spoken extensively on how these poems came from a period in her life during the COVID pandemic of 2020 when she left her boyfriend, home, job and the midwest behind to become unmoored so she could dive into the depths of the unknown. ‘What curses us are rarely witches,’ she advises, ‘instead, it’s the stories the shape of someone else’s fear,’ and from her own self-reflective voyage into a new life she has given us powerful verses of encouragement to also be brave enough to confront these stories. To listen to desire and not be afraid to chase it ‘Your heart really begins to howl when it learns what it’s been missing,’ Sullivan writes, and this collection is a marvelous testimony into answering the call of your own heart.
Instructions for Traveling West
First, you must realize you’re homesick for all the lives
you’re not living. Then, you must commit to the road
and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming
apart. Divorce yourself from routine and control. Instead,
find a desert and fall in. Take the trail that promises a
view. Get lost. Break your toes. Bruise your knees. Keep
going. Watch a purple meadow quiver. Get still. Pet trail
dogs. Buy the hat. Run out of gas. Befriend
strangers. Knight yourself every morning for your newborn
courage. Give grief her own lullaby. Drink whiskey beside
a hundred-year-old cactus. Honor everything. Pray to
something unnameable. Fall for someone impractical.
Reacquaint yourself with desire and all her slender hands.
Bear beauty for as long as you are able, and if you spot a
sunning warbler glowing like a prism, remind yourself –
joy is not a trick.
As an epigraph to the collection, Sullivan quotes David Attenborough saying ‘only now are we beginning to understand that all life on Earth depends on the freedom to move.’ This is, at its core, a collection about searching for what this ‘freedom’ is that is unique to each of us. For Sullivan, we find that it is about a self agency and that she decided she must shed the skin of her life to transcend it and even if it was sometimes emotionally painful or frightening, it was worth it. As she writes in the poem Sockeye, ‘Better, I think, than being touched or even loved, is this—reaching, leaping toward what flashes in the sun. The life that is briefly ours.’ Having grown up the child of medical missionary parents and living in Central African Republic and Haiti, movement across a map was something she was accustomed to and her religious upbringing is present in many of her metaphors and ideas. The book itself is almost like an emotional roadmap, with chapter headings that read a bit like self-help titles—Come Apart, Commit to the Road, Reacquaint Yourself with Desire, Give Grief Her Own Lullabye—but form a rather fluid narrative of introspection and self-acceptance. In an interview with Elise Loehnen she discusses how she structures the collection with this in mind almost like narrative fulfillment of what she needed during the times she wrote the poems.
Though at the end of the day she wanted it to be truthful and not give hard answers, persay, but instead be instructive as a way of finding your own path:
What results is a really moving and almost cinematic journey from cover to cover. I enjoy the way it threads past, present, and abstract introspection as it moves through the poems. Some of the most heartbreaking are the reflective poems about childhood. As childhood seems as good a place as any for a beginning about a life, it begins here because ‘when you’re little, love really knocks you out’ and this is very much a collection about love. The various loves you give, and the loves you receive. I find it quite powerful how she addresses the lessons on love learned in the purity of childhood and infancy of understanding and allows them to grow alongside her as the narrative arc of the poems push into the future.
‘Of course the universe is full of deep magic, but
I think most miracles can be traced back to someone’s profound and quiet kindness.’
We also learn a lot of the life she left behind and why it became a burden to uphold it. She leaves behind a job, such as we learn in Giving Notice about quitting remote work during the pandemic due to carpal tunnel, but also a lover, friends and family. She sees this as a way of stripping herself bear from the world to find the creature inside often dressed in social modernity.
On men we see a resistance to the sort of youthful infatuations of the past a wisening from the ‘way we want what will wound us’ as she writes in Sad Lovers, but also that she was ‘tired of holding up men’s sadness like a bent trophy. Weary of men with deep wounds and an aversion to therapy.’ Now she heads west where she sees men ‘handsome in the way grief makes strangers desirable’ she confronts ideas of embracing desire, not only for others but for oneself. ‘All we’ve got is this skin’ she says in numerous ways through the collection, and one must love their own bones that move them through the beauty of this world. Yet it is not just beauty she desires but the world as a whole.
The world is often bleak here, and we see a lot of recent events threaded into the landscape of the poems. Shatner’s reflections from space appear, the pandemic appears and many of the poems on desire also address the desire to be rid of isolation or rid of the uncertainty in the world. There is a long look into darkness, but one that lights a candle to guide you through.
It is empowering the way she reminds us to remember the beauty in life even when things are hard. Such as in When My Friend is Low, We Walk by the River when a friend says ‘It’s almost cruel…after everything, how the world still insists on being beautiful.’ Through these poems, we see that.
Want
They say men want freedom
and girls want love,
but I've seen women leave
lovers and countries and kingdoms
of comfort just for the chance
to sleep unbothered, to
bathe unwatched, to waltz around
apartments all their own,
wearing nothing but lipstick
the color of desire.
The idea of leaving and being free comes with a lot of reflections with religion in this collection. She had a very religious upbringing and often dives into stories of the ‘cruelty of youth pastors’ or feeling that desire and agency was frowned upon or restricted. In this we see the seed for desiring freedom grow all the more, such as in the poem Of Wildflowers:
When I was young, I heard
SO much about being
A child/woman/man of God
But then I grew up and all
I ever wanted
Was to be of wildflowers,
Of willow, toad, and bone.
Of swallowtails, sow thistle
And cedar, of birds.
She uses Eve as a complex metaphor in this collection. ‘Ever couldn’t leave Adam because Adam was the only man on earth / This significantly lessened her options,’ she writes to juxtapose her own leaving, but also embracing Eve as a symbol of agency and including a poem about Eve refusing to apologize. The wrestling with religion and desire and all the complexities of confronting the lessons and restrictions from childhood come alive in moving ways, being both a reckoning with religious trauma but also trying to cultivate the aspects that empower. It reminds us that people are complex, that lessons aren’t always simple, and that the old stories still offer guideposts to us in the present.
‘I’d put a matchbox in my prayer
So I could make a fire and if
God didn’t hear the prayer
At least he’s see the smoke.’
This is an incredible collection that is full of heart. At times some of the metaphors felt a bit saccharin or thin, but embedded in the overall context you’d really have to be nitpicking for it to distract from the warm, glowing heart of the collection. It does tend to bend towards quotable zingers which is not necessarily a bad thing as you can see from this review, there are so many great quotes and the poems earn each one. Instructions for Traveling West is a gem of a debut and these poems carry your heart along the journey, preparing and empowering them for a journey of your own. I hope any of you who choose a journey towards joy find what you are seeking.
4.5/5
‘I’ve finally found a way to live on the inside of my life. This time, I’m the painter. This time, I’m the muse.’
Why Read Poetry if It Won't Make You Rich?
For starters, your soul will get bigger.
Your love, more terrible and luminous.
Soon, you'll say tender things at parties
after too much champagne. A sidewalk
quince, wet with midnight, will stop
you in your tracks. In time, you'll
find the perfect metaphor for your
child's face. All at once, you'll see
the world and want it again:
clothes flapping on the line,
lilacs strewn and seeding, the luck
of worms. An artichoke with its heart
torn hot and steaming from the throbbing
crown will suddenly turn you on.
Joy Sullivan’s Instructions for Traveling West is about wanting the world even at its worst, about seeking joy and not being afraid to take it, about wanting ‘love that asks to eat you whole,’ and being so consumed with beauty that you want to let that light shine from you endlessly. ‘I want more time,’ she writes, ‘I want to waste my love on everything.’ The poems were forged in the struggles of life to seek such beauty and Sullivan has written and spoken extensively on how these poems came from a period in her life during the COVID pandemic of 2020 when she left her boyfriend, home, job and the midwest behind to become unmoored so she could dive into the depths of the unknown. ‘What curses us are rarely witches,’ she advises, ‘instead, it’s the stories the shape of someone else’s fear,’ and from her own self-reflective voyage into a new life she has given us powerful verses of encouragement to also be brave enough to confront these stories. To listen to desire and not be afraid to chase it ‘Your heart really begins to howl when it learns what it’s been missing,’ Sullivan writes, and this collection is a marvelous testimony into answering the call of your own heart.
Instructions for Traveling West
First, you must realize you’re homesick for all the lives
you’re not living. Then, you must commit to the road
and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming
apart. Divorce yourself from routine and control. Instead,
find a desert and fall in. Take the trail that promises a
view. Get lost. Break your toes. Bruise your knees. Keep
going. Watch a purple meadow quiver. Get still. Pet trail
dogs. Buy the hat. Run out of gas. Befriend
strangers. Knight yourself every morning for your newborn
courage. Give grief her own lullaby. Drink whiskey beside
a hundred-year-old cactus. Honor everything. Pray to
something unnameable. Fall for someone impractical.
Reacquaint yourself with desire and all her slender hands.
Bear beauty for as long as you are able, and if you spot a
sunning warbler glowing like a prism, remind yourself –
joy is not a trick.
As an epigraph to the collection, Sullivan quotes David Attenborough saying ‘only now are we beginning to understand that all life on Earth depends on the freedom to move.’ This is, at its core, a collection about searching for what this ‘freedom’ is that is unique to each of us. For Sullivan, we find that it is about a self agency and that she decided she must shed the skin of her life to transcend it and even if it was sometimes emotionally painful or frightening, it was worth it. As she writes in the poem Sockeye, ‘Better, I think, than being touched or even loved, is this—reaching, leaping toward what flashes in the sun. The life that is briefly ours.’ Having grown up the child of medical missionary parents and living in Central African Republic and Haiti, movement across a map was something she was accustomed to and her religious upbringing is present in many of her metaphors and ideas. The book itself is almost like an emotional roadmap, with chapter headings that read a bit like self-help titles—Come Apart, Commit to the Road, Reacquaint Yourself with Desire, Give Grief Her Own Lullabye—but form a rather fluid narrative of introspection and self-acceptance. In an interview with Elise Loehnen she discusses how she structures the collection with this in mind almost like narrative fulfillment of what she needed during the times she wrote the poems.
‘it was called New Fruit and it really centered around this idea of exodus, like a Edenic beginning, and then a rupture, and then an exodus into some other new space post rupture, right? And so I wrote this poem instructions for traveling West when I was actually on a really long sojourn myself in the middle of the pandemic, and I wrote it really as like a pep talk to me that was traveling throughout the desert in Sedona and throughout Arizona and just like really trying to get the courage to keep going.’
Though at the end of the day she wanted it to be truthful and not give hard answers, persay, but instead be instructive as a way of finding your own path:
‘I don't know if I could promise my readers or even myself at the end of this journey, you'll always find home, or you'll always rest in this place of perfect harmony or peace, but I can promise you at the end, you will know yourself more fully, and you will experience some experience of joy, right, which is why the structure of the book Reoriented to not the original structure…almost as guideposts along the journey.’
What results is a really moving and almost cinematic journey from cover to cover. I enjoy the way it threads past, present, and abstract introspection as it moves through the poems. Some of the most heartbreaking are the reflective poems about childhood. As childhood seems as good a place as any for a beginning about a life, it begins here because ‘when you’re little, love really knocks you out’ and this is very much a collection about love. The various loves you give, and the loves you receive. I find it quite powerful how she addresses the lessons on love learned in the purity of childhood and infancy of understanding and allows them to grow alongside her as the narrative arc of the poems push into the future.
‘Of course the universe is full of deep magic, but
I think most miracles can be traced back to someone’s profound and quiet kindness.’
We also learn a lot of the life she left behind and why it became a burden to uphold it. She leaves behind a job, such as we learn in Giving Notice about quitting remote work during the pandemic due to carpal tunnel, but also a lover, friends and family. She sees this as a way of stripping herself bear from the world to find the creature inside often dressed in social modernity.
‘There's still time to creature, to pluck all the wild cloudberries and carry them home. Even now you can hear coyotes crying at the canyon's edge. Find your first fang, grow back your hackles and howl. This was always your chorus, the mother tongue, a feral hymn, you know by heart.’
On men we see a resistance to the sort of youthful infatuations of the past a wisening from the ‘way we want what will wound us’ as she writes in Sad Lovers, but also that she was ‘tired of holding up men’s sadness like a bent trophy. Weary of men with deep wounds and an aversion to therapy.’ Now she heads west where she sees men ‘handsome in the way grief makes strangers desirable’ she confronts ideas of embracing desire, not only for others but for oneself. ‘All we’ve got is this skin’ she says in numerous ways through the collection, and one must love their own bones that move them through the beauty of this world. Yet it is not just beauty she desires but the world as a whole.
‘I’ll take the skunk of it: musty books and animal breath. I want the wet dog, decaying garbage and apple rot. Life, give me your stinking mouth. Bend, let me kiss it.’
The world is often bleak here, and we see a lot of recent events threaded into the landscape of the poems. Shatner’s reflections from space appear, the pandemic appears and many of the poems on desire also address the desire to be rid of isolation or rid of the uncertainty in the world. There is a long look into darkness, but one that lights a candle to guide you through.
‘Look, America is awful and the earth is too hot and the truth of the matter is we’re all up against the clock. It makes everything simple and urgent: there’s only time to turn toward what you truly love. There’s only time to leap.’
It is empowering the way she reminds us to remember the beauty in life even when things are hard. Such as in When My Friend is Low, We Walk by the River when a friend says ‘It’s almost cruel…after everything, how the world still insists on being beautiful.’ Through these poems, we see that.
Want
They say men want freedom
and girls want love,
but I've seen women leave
lovers and countries and kingdoms
of comfort just for the chance
to sleep unbothered, to
bathe unwatched, to waltz around
apartments all their own,
wearing nothing but lipstick
the color of desire.
The idea of leaving and being free comes with a lot of reflections with religion in this collection. She had a very religious upbringing and often dives into stories of the ‘cruelty of youth pastors’ or feeling that desire and agency was frowned upon or restricted. In this we see the seed for desiring freedom grow all the more, such as in the poem Of Wildflowers:
When I was young, I heard
SO much about being
A child/woman/man of God
But then I grew up and all
I ever wanted
Was to be of wildflowers,
Of willow, toad, and bone.
Of swallowtails, sow thistle
And cedar, of birds.
She uses Eve as a complex metaphor in this collection. ‘Ever couldn’t leave Adam because Adam was the only man on earth / This significantly lessened her options,’ she writes to juxtapose her own leaving, but also embracing Eve as a symbol of agency and including a poem about Eve refusing to apologize. The wrestling with religion and desire and all the complexities of confronting the lessons and restrictions from childhood come alive in moving ways, being both a reckoning with religious trauma but also trying to cultivate the aspects that empower. It reminds us that people are complex, that lessons aren’t always simple, and that the old stories still offer guideposts to us in the present.
‘I’d put a matchbox in my prayer
So I could make a fire and if
God didn’t hear the prayer
At least he’s see the smoke.’
This is an incredible collection that is full of heart. At times some of the metaphors felt a bit saccharin or thin, but embedded in the overall context you’d really have to be nitpicking for it to distract from the warm, glowing heart of the collection. It does tend to bend towards quotable zingers which is not necessarily a bad thing as you can see from this review, there are so many great quotes and the poems earn each one. Instructions for Traveling West is a gem of a debut and these poems carry your heart along the journey, preparing and empowering them for a journey of your own. I hope any of you who choose a journey towards joy find what you are seeking.
4.5/5
‘I’ve finally found a way to live on the inside of my life. This time, I’m the painter. This time, I’m the muse.’
April 18, 2024
2.5 stars
It’s been a long time since I last read poetry, even though I used to really love it. This collection was just okay, some poems really worked for me. I especially loved the poems reflecting on childhood and growing up, and talking about nature.
But some of these felt so random and out of place? There was an entire section of poems about Adam and Eve and I feel like I could’ve done without that personally.
It’s been a long time since I last read poetry, even though I used to really love it. This collection was just okay, some poems really worked for me. I especially loved the poems reflecting on childhood and growing up, and talking about nature.
But some of these felt so random and out of place? There was an entire section of poems about Adam and Eve and I feel like I could’ve done without that personally.
February 4, 2025
3 "Eve lift our gaze from our navels" stars !!
Warm thanx to Spenx who put this collection on my radar. I am leaving a small review.
I had two experiences of reading this book but first...
I am very happy and glad that Ms. Sullivan is breaking free from constraints and interpersonal patterns that held her back...best wishes on this journey of travelling Westwards.
As a reader, however, I felt mostly indifferent and sometimes annoyed at the repetitiveness, the structure, and the adolescent writing. I often felt like these poems were completed in a single take and fed to legions of fans who devoured them and ooohed and aaaahed. Much of this felt lazy....deepen the experience and please move from indulgence to reflection....let the poetry reflect the challenges of the journey rather than .....anyhow most of the book was a 2.75 experience....fair but not truly worthwhile
However...in the middle of the book...there is a sequence of poems of Eve re-imagined that moved both my soul and my heart and convinced this reader that Ms. Sullivan truly is a poet. I read each of these poems several times and this sequence is entitled Interlude: Westward, a Woman Walks and merits five shining stars for these ten poems.
Here is a Sample
Eden'
He said: If you leave me. I'll go hungry.
Above them the moon paled and held
its breath. She said: Come with me;
it will be easy in the dark.
He said: It isn't the right time.
She said: I'm one hundred eyars old,
and I'm tired. The grass began to slither
He said: The crops will fail,
the animals run wild. She said:
My body will be the harvest.
She flexed the sentence like a muscle.
The tree panted and sighed.
He said: I'm afraid. She made a web
out of her hands and caught
his face. She said: I'll go first
-Joy Sullivan
January 8, 2024
5/5
I think that this was perhaps the greatest poetry collection I have ever read.
When I was in high school, an early poetry reader and aspiring writer, I became obsessed with the book “Between You and These Bones”. I did not feel fulfilled with my own writing and poetry career until I could hold my best piece up beside my favourite from that book and say; “yes, this is the standard I have been working towards”. I fear that this book may be the equivalent of that in my adult life. I also fear that I will never be able to have such a relationship with words and my own thoughts that I could conceive a book so effortlessly all-encompassing, warm-blooded, and glittering as this. Questioning your understanding of love? Religion? A woman’s choice whether or not to have children? The British Monarchy? This book will cure you. There is something so sharp and visceral about it, but I also feel so comforted and understood. I haven’t recognized myself in poetry in a long time, and this book has put the breath back into my lungs as both as writer and a reader. What an incredible anthology.
I think that this was perhaps the greatest poetry collection I have ever read.
When I was in high school, an early poetry reader and aspiring writer, I became obsessed with the book “Between You and These Bones”. I did not feel fulfilled with my own writing and poetry career until I could hold my best piece up beside my favourite from that book and say; “yes, this is the standard I have been working towards”. I fear that this book may be the equivalent of that in my adult life. I also fear that I will never be able to have such a relationship with words and my own thoughts that I could conceive a book so effortlessly all-encompassing, warm-blooded, and glittering as this. Questioning your understanding of love? Religion? A woman’s choice whether or not to have children? The British Monarchy? This book will cure you. There is something so sharp and visceral about it, but I also feel so comforted and understood. I haven’t recognized myself in poetry in a long time, and this book has put the breath back into my lungs as both as writer and a reader. What an incredible anthology.
Read
February 10, 2025Like many collections, this one is a mixed bag. A few soar. Some land well. And some miss the landing.
April 12, 2024
Brb, buying a copy of this for everyone in my life.
I first read Sullivan's poem "my mother says kissing a man without a mustache is like eating an egg without salt" as an jnstagram post which captured my attention and made me smile, but didnt encourage me to get more into her work...the totality of this collection of poems, at this time in my life and probably on this earth is so damn perfect and vital. Sullivan writes her indecision and her loneliness and her joy so perfectly, and i definitely cried more than once reading it. I loved it, i love it, i want to tuck it in all my bags and on every table of my house.
Thanks, netgalley and random house for letting me review this book.
I first read Sullivan's poem "my mother says kissing a man without a mustache is like eating an egg without salt" as an jnstagram post which captured my attention and made me smile, but didnt encourage me to get more into her work...the totality of this collection of poems, at this time in my life and probably on this earth is so damn perfect and vital. Sullivan writes her indecision and her loneliness and her joy so perfectly, and i definitely cried more than once reading it. I loved it, i love it, i want to tuck it in all my bags and on every table of my house.
Thanks, netgalley and random house for letting me review this book.
April 12, 2024
Intensely readable. Filled with quiet moments of reflection, joy, pain, love. The micro-moments in the midst of the largest macros. A very nice collection.
April 11, 2024
An absolute feast.
April 11, 2024
This book is my new bible; I’m taking it with me, everywhere. I’m so grateful it was written.
February 9, 2024
This was a very emotional and captivating read. I really connected to several of the poems in the collection. Some of the stand out ones were "Duck","Luck 1","When My Friend is Low We Walk By The River", and "Even If." This is a collection I will be adding to my shelves as it's a collection I can really see myself coming back to over time. I highly recommend this as I feel there is something for everyone.
August 25, 2024
“Instructions for Traveling West” is the debut poetry collection of Joy Sullivan. Sullivan writes the kind of poems you expect to see on Instagram (the author blurb does include an Instagram handle). They appear in whatever form she thinks works (prose paragraphs, line and stanzas) with no deeper meaning. There is no rhyme, there is no rhythm.
Most of her poems are autobiographical in nature (about being the child of fundamentalist missionaries, about being an atheist, about life in the pandemic, about her love life, about mean comments left on Instagram) and feel a bit like over-sharing (and sometimes braggy - yes, we’d all love to walk away from our day jobs and go to Paris and drink wine and read poetry).
I found the tone of many of these poems obnoxious. There’s a real “live, laugh, love” naïveté to a lot of them:
Look, America is awful and the earth is too hot and the truth of the matter is we're all up against the clock. It makes everything simple and urgent: there's only time to turn toward what you truly love. There's only time to leap.
Then, randomly, in the midst of all these first person poems about the poet’s life, there are ten poems about the biblical figure of Eve. What editor let those end up in this collection?
A few of the poems deal with current-ish events: the pandemic, the death of Queen Elizabeth, the invasion of Ukraine . . . William Shatner going into space?
Finally, Sullivan has a series of tropes that she falls back on time and time again. I thought I was going to gag if I had to read another line about drinking from the bottle, dodging squirrels while driving, eating oysters, or being like a redwood.
All that being said, I always try to find at least one poem in the collection that I like. I thought the very first, from which the collection gets its name, was the strongest:
Instructions for Traveling West
First, you must realize you're homesick for all the lives you're not living. Then, you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming apart. Divorce yourself from routine and control. Instead, find a desert and fall in. Take the trail that promises a view. Get lost. Break your toes. Bruise your knees. Keep going. Watch a purple meadow quiver. Get still. Pet trail dogs. Buy the hat. Run out of gas. Befriend strangers. Knight yourself every morning for your newborn courage. Give grief her own lullaby. Drink whisky beside a hundred-year-old cactus. Honor everything. Pray to something unnameable. Fall for someone impractical. Reacquaint yourself with desire and all her slender hands. Bear beauty for as long as you are able and if you spot a sunning warbler glowing like a prism, remind yourself- joy is not a trick.
Though it takes a bit of an odd turn at the end (for me at least), I like this poem that explains why one should read poetry:
Why Read Poetry
if It Won't Make You Rich?
For starters, your soul will get bigger.
Your love, more terrible and luminous.
Soon, you'll say tender things at parties after too much champagne. A sidewalk quince, wet with midnight, will stop you in your tracks. In time, you'll find the perfect metaphor for your child's face. All at once, you'll see the world and want it again: clothes flapping on the line, lilacs strewn and seeding, the luck of worms. An artichoke with its heart torn hot and steaming from the throbbing crown will suddenly turn you on.
Finally, because I, too, love a juicy tomato sandwich, I appreciated this one:
Tomatoes
I waited so long for love and suddenly, here it is standing in the
garden, hands full
of heirlooms hot from the sun.
Soon, we'll make a supper of them.
Salted slabs between slices of bread.
Your beard silvers. My hips ripen.
The mail piles up.
Phone calls go unanswered. Forgive us.
Our mouths are full of tomatoes.
We are so busy
being small and hungry and alive.
Most of her poems are autobiographical in nature (about being the child of fundamentalist missionaries, about being an atheist, about life in the pandemic, about her love life, about mean comments left on Instagram) and feel a bit like over-sharing (and sometimes braggy - yes, we’d all love to walk away from our day jobs and go to Paris and drink wine and read poetry).
I found the tone of many of these poems obnoxious. There’s a real “live, laugh, love” naïveté to a lot of them:
Look, America is awful and the earth is too hot and the truth of the matter is we're all up against the clock. It makes everything simple and urgent: there's only time to turn toward what you truly love. There's only time to leap.
Then, randomly, in the midst of all these first person poems about the poet’s life, there are ten poems about the biblical figure of Eve. What editor let those end up in this collection?
A few of the poems deal with current-ish events: the pandemic, the death of Queen Elizabeth, the invasion of Ukraine . . . William Shatner going into space?
Finally, Sullivan has a series of tropes that she falls back on time and time again. I thought I was going to gag if I had to read another line about drinking from the bottle, dodging squirrels while driving, eating oysters, or being like a redwood.
All that being said, I always try to find at least one poem in the collection that I like. I thought the very first, from which the collection gets its name, was the strongest:
Instructions for Traveling West
First, you must realize you're homesick for all the lives you're not living. Then, you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming apart. Divorce yourself from routine and control. Instead, find a desert and fall in. Take the trail that promises a view. Get lost. Break your toes. Bruise your knees. Keep going. Watch a purple meadow quiver. Get still. Pet trail dogs. Buy the hat. Run out of gas. Befriend strangers. Knight yourself every morning for your newborn courage. Give grief her own lullaby. Drink whisky beside a hundred-year-old cactus. Honor everything. Pray to something unnameable. Fall for someone impractical. Reacquaint yourself with desire and all her slender hands. Bear beauty for as long as you are able and if you spot a sunning warbler glowing like a prism, remind yourself- joy is not a trick.
Though it takes a bit of an odd turn at the end (for me at least), I like this poem that explains why one should read poetry:
Why Read Poetry
if It Won't Make You Rich?
For starters, your soul will get bigger.
Your love, more terrible and luminous.
Soon, you'll say tender things at parties after too much champagne. A sidewalk quince, wet with midnight, will stop you in your tracks. In time, you'll find the perfect metaphor for your child's face. All at once, you'll see the world and want it again: clothes flapping on the line, lilacs strewn and seeding, the luck of worms. An artichoke with its heart torn hot and steaming from the throbbing crown will suddenly turn you on.
Finally, because I, too, love a juicy tomato sandwich, I appreciated this one:
Tomatoes
I waited so long for love and suddenly, here it is standing in the
garden, hands full
of heirlooms hot from the sun.
Soon, we'll make a supper of them.
Salted slabs between slices of bread.
Your beard silvers. My hips ripen.
The mail piles up.
Phone calls go unanswered. Forgive us.
Our mouths are full of tomatoes.
We are so busy
being small and hungry and alive.
May 11, 2024
“Even if foolhardy, ill-advised, or half mad. Even if you do not yet understand your own reasons and the waves are at your throat. Even if leaving guts your heart to its last thrumming fiber. Even still, GO and let this life eat you to the bone.” GAWDAYUM 😨😨 10/10 recommend reading this after ending a long-term relationship, because when I tell you it HITS!!! It sure does!!!
September 30, 2025
I don't know if poetry is getting harder or if I am getting softer, but my ratio of crying to not crying when reading poetry is tipping rapidly in favor of tears.
December 8, 2023
This book truly moved me. So much of it resonated with me and my own life- the leaping into the unknown, the experience of being a woman in this world, the natural beauty and heartbreak of this blue little marble we all inhabit… it is a stunning work of art. Joy gives language to universal feelings that I think most people struggle to name, let alone describe in such a visceral and aching way. She has this incredible ability to name things that you've told yourself are afterthoughts or just forgotten ghosts of your life, unique only to you, but are actually the bones of our emotional human experience. Her ability to use vivid language, striking vocabulary, and textured metaphors in her writing— and nail it every time is unmatched. The gripping imagery of wildlife, the ocean, and our innate human nature felt particularly electric.
This book is special and is going to travel all the way til west turns east.
This book is special and is going to travel all the way til west turns east.
April 30, 2024
A handful of these poems really spoke to me, and there is a lot of beautiful, sensory language that I found engaging. It wasn't a total hit for me, but it's still a decent piece of work that I think a lot of people can connect with.
July 1, 2024
The type of poetry that makes me feel 🥰💗🥲🥭
August 29, 2025
Not all poems deeply resonated, but all were beautiful.
Even if foolhardy,
ill-advised, or half-mad.
Even if you do not yet
understand your own
reasons and the waves
are at your throat. Even if
leaving guts your heart
to its last
thrumming fiber.
Even if, go
and let this life eat you
to the bone.
Even if foolhardy,
ill-advised, or half-mad.
Even if you do not yet
understand your own
reasons and the waves
are at your throat. Even if
leaving guts your heart
to its last
thrumming fiber.
Even if, go
and let this life eat you
to the bone.
January 17, 2025
I loved loved LOVED this!
“Nothing is as lonely as childhood, and the person to finally interrupt that ache is a big miracle.”
“You never forget the silhouette of someone small and familiar running down your street, sweaty & hopeful that you can come out to play.”
“This morning the sunshine is thick enough to swim in. As if you could fling yourself into it and float. I wanna wear it like a robe, squeeze it into my suitcase, swallow it whole like a hot lemon.”
“Sometimes you don’t know you are starving until you’ve had a proper meal. Thats when your heart begins to howl- when it knows what it’s been missing.”
“I would like to touch the world and not harm it. I would like to be touched and not harmed by the world.”
“A friend of mine growing up on a farm found her hair in the nests of robins. Dark strands in the structure of the cradle. This is a compliment I would like to receive. A synonym for purpose.”
“As long as it rains, anything can be new”
*** the poem “Almonds”
*** the poem “On Days I hate My Body, I Remember Redwoods”
*** the poem “In This New Life”
“I imagine someone small as my own. I wanna show her what a prism does after it swallows light, I wanna feed her pears.”
“Nothing is as lonely as childhood, and the person to finally interrupt that ache is a big miracle.”
“You never forget the silhouette of someone small and familiar running down your street, sweaty & hopeful that you can come out to play.”
“This morning the sunshine is thick enough to swim in. As if you could fling yourself into it and float. I wanna wear it like a robe, squeeze it into my suitcase, swallow it whole like a hot lemon.”
“Sometimes you don’t know you are starving until you’ve had a proper meal. Thats when your heart begins to howl- when it knows what it’s been missing.”
“I would like to touch the world and not harm it. I would like to be touched and not harmed by the world.”
“A friend of mine growing up on a farm found her hair in the nests of robins. Dark strands in the structure of the cradle. This is a compliment I would like to receive. A synonym for purpose.”
“As long as it rains, anything can be new”
*** the poem “Almonds”
*** the poem “On Days I hate My Body, I Remember Redwoods”
*** the poem “In This New Life”
“I imagine someone small as my own. I wanna show her what a prism does after it swallows light, I wanna feed her pears.”
April 20, 2024
YES YES YES YES! THIS ATE
April 20, 2024
Well worth the wait — possibly my favourite book of poetry ever.
Born in Ohio, Joy spent her childhood abroad—living in Quebec, Haiti, and the Central African Republic. This is her first book.
Poems to ponder:
• In the office
• Giving notice
• Howl
• Want
• Comment section
and my favourite:
I took my body out to dinner
💛✨
Born in Ohio, Joy spent her childhood abroad—living in Quebec, Haiti, and the Central African Republic. This is her first book.
Poems to ponder:
• In the office
• Giving notice
• Howl
• Want
• Comment section
and my favourite:
I took my body out to dinner
💛✨
April 19, 2024
I loved this book. I preordered it, as I used some of Joys poems while teaching yoga classes and felt it would be a good resource. The poems are beautiful and real and relatable. I also didn’t know she was from Ohio before buying this book and the mentions of Ohio added even more relatability for me. I will be revisiting this book again & again 🌻💛
April 18, 2024
I had to read a book of poetry for a library reading challenge, I was not excited and left it for one of the last (of 18) 2024 prompts. I throughly enjoyed this book (loved the author reading the audiobook) and now plan to purchase it for my mom for Mother's Day!
April 14, 2024
a collection of poems best read on the train, in your childhood bedroom, sitting in the sun with a dog, after crying with your mother, in a therapist office, when watching your best friend become a mom, after graduating and starting your first job, and when beginning to talk to someone new after breaking your own heart. beautiful and messy and full of life, just gorgeous
March 12, 2024
(received ARC through NetGalley)
a very strong collection. a few of these were so sweet, i wanted to read them to my roommates, to share a moment of tenderness with them, to feel recognized by certain poems, in particular "safe".
what keeps me from rating this a full 5 stars is the amount of prose poems in here, which i understand is entirely a personal bias and does not reflect the skill of sullivan's publication. i also feel some poems are just too "modern" for my taste, along with feeling like this book was not as fully curated as it could have been.
overall, a good read, with something for everyone in it.
a very strong collection. a few of these were so sweet, i wanted to read them to my roommates, to share a moment of tenderness with them, to feel recognized by certain poems, in particular "safe".
what keeps me from rating this a full 5 stars is the amount of prose poems in here, which i understand is entirely a personal bias and does not reflect the skill of sullivan's publication. i also feel some poems are just too "modern" for my taste, along with feeling like this book was not as fully curated as it could have been.
overall, a good read, with something for everyone in it.
April 15, 2024
Seattle Public Library peak pick (special section semi-advertised to patrons). A total judge a book by its cover moment along with some strong opening lines. Lots of pretty language, but repetitive imagery, references, and metaphors
January 1, 2025
....i regret reading this. it made me upset at poetry in general. felt like grading a set of half assed student papers. mary oliver comparisons are Not earned.
December 31, 2025
whoooooooo what a book! in a relatively short collection, sullivan touches on a vast array of things - heavy in subject yet gentle in delivery. the poems feel light and digestible, at times humorous, yet still complex and expansive. reflections on her childhood and past homes give us a peek into the love of a mother, past relationships, the backdrop of community, nostalgia woven into nearly every phrase. the writing continues to follow the trajectory of her life, laying out a foundation for life lessons learnt through different stages of growth. ripe imagery of fruit transforms into metaphors for familial love. descriptions of animals in motions highlight the immenseness of grief. an intermission centered around adam and eve celebrates the joy of womanhood while settings of the west ground the collection in an intimate relationship with nature.
of course there are poems that fall a little flatter than others - but it would be a shame to let those have too much influence over this review when a majority of them made me feel held and comforted in a very lovely way!!!
“at noon, you find shame, saran-wrapped in your lunchbox, next to the turkey sandwich.”
“because when grief came, as i knew she would, she only soft-pawed up the gray carpet steps and stood in the doorframe, watching with her yellow eyes.”
“give me more time on earth, and i’d take any body. a body ripe or ruined. monstrous or errant. make me a redwood tree. body becoming branch becoming sky becoming breath. make me a slug upon her neck. the moth wilting at her roots…”
also a quick reflection below of how i personally experienced this book, feel free to read or not i just wanted to share
i read this book twice in the past year, and loved it very much both times. in july, it was the one book i brought on the jmt. for twenty two days it was a sort of third companion on the trail - offering insight and advice, poems tugging on every single muscle. on my initial read, i gravitated most to the ones about self reflection, our connection to nature, physical sensations, assuming a cause and effect of my external environment at the time (what with being in the mountains for three weeks and what not). on my second read, i was back in michigan after five months of literally traveling out west (which i find funny). this time, the poems that held the most meaning for me were the ones about grief (over people and place), human connection, embraced joy, etc. it’s always an interesting thing to notice how where you are in life, whether physically or emotionally, directly impacts your experience of a book. this was neat to think back on, kinda makes me want to reread it every year!!!
of course there are poems that fall a little flatter than others - but it would be a shame to let those have too much influence over this review when a majority of them made me feel held and comforted in a very lovely way!!!
“at noon, you find shame, saran-wrapped in your lunchbox, next to the turkey sandwich.”
“because when grief came, as i knew she would, she only soft-pawed up the gray carpet steps and stood in the doorframe, watching with her yellow eyes.”
“give me more time on earth, and i’d take any body. a body ripe or ruined. monstrous or errant. make me a redwood tree. body becoming branch becoming sky becoming breath. make me a slug upon her neck. the moth wilting at her roots…”
also a quick reflection below of how i personally experienced this book, feel free to read or not i just wanted to share
i read this book twice in the past year, and loved it very much both times. in july, it was the one book i brought on the jmt. for twenty two days it was a sort of third companion on the trail - offering insight and advice, poems tugging on every single muscle. on my initial read, i gravitated most to the ones about self reflection, our connection to nature, physical sensations, assuming a cause and effect of my external environment at the time (what with being in the mountains for three weeks and what not). on my second read, i was back in michigan after five months of literally traveling out west (which i find funny). this time, the poems that held the most meaning for me were the ones about grief (over people and place), human connection, embraced joy, etc. it’s always an interesting thing to notice how where you are in life, whether physically or emotionally, directly impacts your experience of a book. this was neat to think back on, kinda makes me want to reread it every year!!!
Read
March 27, 2025”For starters, your soul will get bigger. / Your love, more terrible and luminous.” – from “Why Read Poetry If It Won’t Make You Rich?” (71)
Joy Sullivan’s debut poetry collection Instructions for Traveling West (The Dial Press) is about going, the importance of going, and the complications involved in going. If we’re lucky, something pushes us onward, and Sullivan explores both the luck and the instinct in poems about relationships, nature, road trips, food, Eve, choices, and much more. Sullivan writes with awareness of and affection for women because this all is made more difficult by societal attitudes and expectations that women are required to either accept or shake off. It’s become a bit of a cliche to describe some poetry as “poems for people who think they don’t like poetry,” but Joy Sullivan’s work is in that vein: accessible, rewarding, wise, and relatable.
”no matter / which road you take, it will be both glorious and unbearable” – from “Culpable” (133)
Joy Sullivan’s debut poetry collection Instructions for Traveling West (The Dial Press) is about going, the importance of going, and the complications involved in going. If we’re lucky, something pushes us onward, and Sullivan explores both the luck and the instinct in poems about relationships, nature, road trips, food, Eve, choices, and much more. Sullivan writes with awareness of and affection for women because this all is made more difficult by societal attitudes and expectations that women are required to either accept or shake off. It’s become a bit of a cliche to describe some poetry as “poems for people who think they don’t like poetry,” but Joy Sullivan’s work is in that vein: accessible, rewarding, wise, and relatable.
”no matter / which road you take, it will be both glorious and unbearable” – from “Culpable” (133)
May 25, 2024
I wanted this book to last forever. Every time I picked it up it gave me something beautiful; Often that beautiful thing was tears.
I don’t read tons of poetry, but this one hit all the places for me. It’s beautiful, and I’m glad I bought my own copy because I know I’m going to be coming back to it again.
I don’t read tons of poetry, but this one hit all the places for me. It’s beautiful, and I’m glad I bought my own copy because I know I’m going to be coming back to it again.
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