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In Your Own Words: A Poetry Handbook
You already have a voice. This book helps you find it.
Most of us decided long ago that poetry wasn't for us, somewhere in a classroom, where it stopped being something we felt and became something we were tested on. But if you have ever been stopped by a line in a song, carried a few words for years without trying, or felt something you couldn't quite say out loud, then poetry has been yours all along. You just haven't written it down yet.
In Your Own Words is a warm, plain-spoken guide to writing poetry, for complete beginners and for anyone who already writes and wants to sound more like themselves. It doesn't lecture from a height. It shares, friend to friend, how one boy with a Walkman grew into a lifelong poet, and how you can take the same small steps.
Across fourteen short chapters, you'll learn
- Notice the small, ordinary moments that every real poem is made from
- Say true things plainly, without trying to "sound like a poet"
- Show a feeling instead of naming it, the single move that changes everything
- Find the shape that fits you, in free verse, rhyme, or the prose-poem
- Revise a rough draft into a finished poem, one pass at a time
This paperback is a write-in edition, with space after every exercise to draft your poems right in the book, so it becomes a keepsake of the first poems you ever wrote.
You already have a voice. Turn the page, and let's go and find it.
Most of us decided long ago that poetry wasn't for us, somewhere in a classroom, where it stopped being something we felt and became something we were tested on. But if you have ever been stopped by a line in a song, carried a few words for years without trying, or felt something you couldn't quite say out loud, then poetry has been yours all along. You just haven't written it down yet.
In Your Own Words is a warm, plain-spoken guide to writing poetry, for complete beginners and for anyone who already writes and wants to sound more like themselves. It doesn't lecture from a height. It shares, friend to friend, how one boy with a Walkman grew into a lifelong poet, and how you can take the same small steps.
Across fourteen short chapters, you'll learn
- Notice the small, ordinary moments that every real poem is made from
- Say true things plainly, without trying to "sound like a poet"
- Show a feeling instead of naming it, the single move that changes everything
- Find the shape that fits you, in free verse, rhyme, or the prose-poem
- Revise a rough draft into a finished poem, one pass at a time
This paperback is a write-in edition, with space after every exercise to draft your poems right in the book, so it becomes a keepsake of the first poems you ever wrote.
You already have a voice. Turn the page, and let's go and find it.
86 pages, Hardcover
Published September 21, 2026
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