You survive, but what do you do with the rage? These poems crack open the silence, making room for grief, desire, and a girlhood shaped by...

You survive, but what do you do with the rage? These poems crack open the silence, making room for grief, desire, and a girlhood shaped by beauty and brutality.

Leila Mottley’s debut poetry collection pulses with raw emotion, beauty, and unflinching truth. These are poems born from pain, power, and presence, exploring girlhood, Black identity, survival, sexuality, and what it means to live in a body that is both a battleground and a source of brilliance.

Mottley writes with a voice that is young, urgent, and luminous. Her poems sit at the intersection of protest and tenderness, often breaking form and spilling over the page like they’re trying to escape something or make something whole. There’s rhythm, rage, sensuality, and softness in equal measure. It’s not just a collection to read, it’s one to feel.

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📗 In The Mood For…

Understanding Myself
Mottley’s poems ask: How do you become whole when the world keeps taking pieces of you?
✅ Raw, honest reflections on identity, fear, and self-preservation
✅ A poetic exploration of becoming amid pain

Healing
There is grief in these pages but also reclamation.
✅ Names trauma without turning away from it
✅ Offers poetry as a form of survival and gentle resistance

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📘 Stories About…

Pain, Suffering & Recovery
Girlhood, violence, and systemic erasure—told through a lens of radical honesty.
✅ Examines the cost of being seen, and the ache of being invisible
✅ A testimony of survival in poetic form