Shades

By Samantha Finley

So when they tell you / to go outside, to explore, / fall in love instead.

Shades is an all-encompassing poetry collection that celebrates the many forms of human emotion. Drawing from her personal experiences, poet Sam Finley shares the most blissful moments of her life as well as the most devastating.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Jul 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781641378642

Book preview

Shades.jpg

SHADES

SHADES

Samantha Finley

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2020 Samantha Finley

All rights reserved.

SHADES

ISBN

978-1-64137-978-6 Paperback

978-1-64137-863-5 Kindle Ebook

978-1-64137-864-2 Ebook

For my father who loved me first, my brother who remedies my loss, my sister who helps me learn something new every day, and my mother who gave me life.

Introduction

Life is never one constant emotion. It is a continual series of highs and lows where, in the middle, there is a giant ball of every extant emotion, waiting to be released and experienced.

I wrote my first poem for sixth grade English class, not having yet experienced the highs and lows of anything. As I continued to write through adolescence into young adulthood, I realized that the ball of human feeling is unpredictable—more often than not, you are stuck in a never-ending, ebbing and flowing tide.

Time waits for nobody. It will predict your first love and strip it away before you can say those three words. It will show you loss and then bring you renewed life, life so abundant you are too overwhelmed to breathe. When you start writing, you never notice how much time passes until after, looking at the clock and wondering if you’ve missed any crucial details. Time asks you to relinquish your memories for the sake of making new ones and to move on from people, places, and things when they don’t make you happy anymore (and sometimes when they still do).

Poetry is that feeling-filled ball, timestamped. It is a pathway to intricately marking the passage of time and emotion. It can be a journal you cry into every night or a coffee-infused subway ride on the way home from class. Poetry makes sure you don’t miss any details; it speaks languages you have never heard before but understand in your heart.

When something bad happens to me, I write. When something wonderful happens to me, I write. If the sky is a certain shade of pink, I write. If my friends laugh a certain way, I write. After I wrote my first poem, it became hard to write in any other form. I was able to document my feelings, my surroundings, and my thoughts in such a way that made life seem special, as if it was infused with magic. As long as I was writing, I maintained a strong grip over my emotions, which made dealing with what life had to throw at me much easier.

We’ve all had more life-changing experiences than can be counted. Through all of it, I have always tried to take what I have learned, write about it, and then put it away. I have learned that writing doesn’t solve everything but it can make the bad feelings seem almost worthwhile. I’ve found myself saying more than once, If there’s any good thing to come out of this situation, it must be a poem. Of course, there have been times where I have either been too happy to pay attention, too sad to open my eyes, or too grief-stricken to pick up a pen, but these are the overflowing emotions that—when I am eventually able to confront them—wind up holding the most sway. They are inspired by the moments I know I could never be myself without.

There will be driving with the top down, Radiohead blasting, summer night experiences, just as there will be "he left without a trace, and the hole in