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by Beth Gylys (Author)
Your Own Sky: A Book of Breakups explores the many forms heartbreak takes-personal, psychological, political, and even existential. Through inventive structures ranging from lyric sequences and narrative poems to questionnaires, prayers, equations, and hybrid forms, the collection examines the aftermath of ruptured relationships and the surprising transformations they provoke. Gylys's speakers move through grief's rawness-wandering cities newly emptied of meaning, clinging to rituals and magical thinking, confronting self-doubt and self-sabotage, and revisiting past selves with humor and candor. Breakups appear as revisions, revelations, distortions, and unlikely love stories; as Barbie dolls abandoned on the roadside, scrambled eggs signaling an ending, or friends offering an "anti-breakup" of deep steadiness. Across these shifting modes, the poems reveal heartbreak as both wound and aperture-an invitation to shed illusions, reclaim the self, and inhabit, at last, one's own sky.
