Quiver

By Maya Workowski

Find the magic of the universe everywhere, in everyday life.

Feel the high of connectedness to the universe in a way that speaks to today’s audience through poems that affirm queerness, intersectional feminism, critical thinking, and nonjudgemental awareness.

Longing for spiritual oneness is something we all crave — but sometimes falter on how to achieve. Whether it’s growing up in a religion that felt oppressive or growing up with no spiritual guidance at all, finding a path that is healing is also often challenging and lonely.

Find community with this award-winning, bestselling book that seeks to unite queer, feminist readers in the search for spirituality & contentedness.

Unblinking. Playful. Provocative.

Maya Workowski is an American poet. She graduated with distinction from Franklin & Marshall College. There, she was also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of FEM&M Magazine. Her work has been featured in Wingless Dreamer Press, New Voices, Polaris, and she has competed in top poetry slams such as Women of the World Poetry Slam.

Pick up your copy of Quiver today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781304944764

Book preview

Preface

These poems were birthed from a place of untangling. As such, each poem is moreso a question than an answer (and represent experience over judgment). In this willingness to float freely within the work, I also consciously disentangled myself from how a reader would view these poems. I divorced myself from the politics of certain reactions within the speaker (or what it might mean to say certain things), which results in asking questions like Is it right for the speaker to do this or feel this? Instead, these poems try to separate action from judgment. It just is. The speaker just exists. There’s just experience. I wanted to write the truest things I could—not in terms of fiction or nonfiction delineation, but in terms of sentiment. Does this feel true? Does this make me glow inside with phenomenological mutuality? From this point of personal truth, I decided that the work would resonate with the readers it is meant to find.

The disentanglement mentioned above mirrors the thematic shifts that occur for the speaker. The speaker is disentangling herself from religion and unpacking what that childhood looked like in a way that’s not actually focused on loss. I tried to make the speaker’s experience informed by the past but not chained to a conscious obsession with defining oneself by trauma (see Letter from Us to the first Pyou and Route 100). Currently there’s a literary idea that trauma is the only thing worth writing about; I wanted to subtly push against that poetic aesthetic. We must love ourselves more than we love our traumas. We must love ourselves into evolution.

When starting this draft, I didn’t realize how much I had to sit with. I thought I had sat with it all, already. I intended to write about spirituality, but instead I ended up writing about organized religion. So in some ways, this book ended up being much