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Controlled Burn
Controlled Burn is a fragmentary poetry collection that traces the interior life of a narrator living with intense attachment, emotional volatility, addiction, ambition, and survival. Structured in thematic sections—Idealization, Impermanence, Dissociation, Diagnosis, Addiction, Pressure, Rebirth, and Continuance—the book moves through cycles of love, loss, self-destruction, and persistence. Relationships are portrayed as both salvation and threat, oscillating between devotion and abandonment, warmth and numbness. The speaker grapples openly with Borderline Personality Disorder, using stark metaphors of fire, ice, blood, and pressure to examine how identity fractures under emotional extremes.
Addiction appears as both coping mechanism and self-erasure, while work, ambition, and productivity become crucibles that promise meaning at the cost of selfhood. Throughout, the poems refuse tidy healing is partial, hope is fragile, and survival is portrayed not as triumph but as endurance. The titular “controlled burn” becomes the central metaphor—destruction carefully managed to prevent total collapse. Rather than offering guidance or redemption, the collection documents what it means to remain alive while carrying unresolved pain. Controlled Burn is not a linear narrative but a psychological record of someone learning how to stay warm without being consumed.
Addiction appears as both coping mechanism and self-erasure, while work, ambition, and productivity become crucibles that promise meaning at the cost of selfhood. Throughout, the poems refuse tidy healing is partial, hope is fragile, and survival is portrayed not as triumph but as endurance. The titular “controlled burn” becomes the central metaphor—destruction carefully managed to prevent total collapse. Rather than offering guidance or redemption, the collection documents what it means to remain alive while carrying unresolved pain. Controlled Burn is not a linear narrative but a psychological record of someone learning how to stay warm without being consumed.
51 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 6, 2026
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