Through emotional claustrophobia, "To Grow a Tree" transforms trauma into landscape and asks whether growth is possible when the soil itself has learned suffering. Tender, violent, and deeply lonely, it tries to lure those willing to linger into a forest of inner states where memory, grief, and selfhood continuously rearrange themselves. Structured as a gradual collapse inward, the poems move from paranoia, surveillance, and fragmentation toward grief, bodily deterioration, and addiction, shifting fear of external forces into internal ruin. Grief becomes environmental rather than autobiographical, turning childhood into geography, pain into architecture, and identity into something slowly absorbed by forces larger than itself. Its strongest dimension lies in fractured selfhood: shame, alienation, self-erasure, and the suspicion that identity is never entirely our own. Suffering rarely appears in isolation; instead, it spreads through bodies, memories, and landscapes, reshaping whatever it touches. This is not a book about becoming. It is about getting lost among trees long enough to realize the soil had already shaped you, carrying your name long before you learned how to call yourself by it. Written, designed, illustrated, and published alone. 232 pages, 2026.
