Homeward

What if the home you are homesick for is still ahead of you?

"I desperately wanted to go home.
To a place
where the rattling finds its poise
And the shots fired, falls silent;
As simple as that."

That is where Homeward begins, and the simple part turns out to be the hard part. Willowly's first poetry collection follows the want through four parts. First the want itself, chronic and loud, past a last lemon and a schoolyard full of witch trials. Then the crater: Empty Ballroom, Worst Enemy, a poem titled (cry for help), parentheses and all. Then metamorphosis, which is what love does to a person: the dark horse, the matryoshka doll, the girl who fled first and learned the life of a bolter. And finally the turn for home, where everything is blue and a voice keeps asking, "Why are you blue, oh so blue?"

Five hand-drawn illustrations run alongside the poems.

Willowly is a student writer and singer-songwriter who wrote these poems across her teenage years. She builds her poems the way she builds songs: on refrains, on images that come back a few pages later, on lines that keep a beat.

"The want keeps me going," she writes. If you have ever been homesick without an address, these poems about longing, healing, and belonging walk the road back with you.