I Think of You When I Hold My Breath is a daring, coming-of-age collection of poetry. It explores admiration, anger, infatuation, prejudice, landscapes, and loneliness.
Author Lara Abuali is a 12-year-old poet who is always interested in defying tired old norms. Every poem in her debut book has something forbidden in it, be it an implied idea or a blunt mention of something considered to be a taboo. In her words, Lara sometimes delicately steps around her ideas, and sometimes she stomps on them. But she always leaves a few secrets for her reader to search for.
Lara, a Palestinian-Canadian, was born and raised in Hong Kong. She now lives in Jordan with her family, where she attends the eighth grade at King's Academy. She has been writing poetry and stories since the age of six.
In 2018, Lara was awarded the Scholastic Gold Key Award in the US by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers for her poetry collection Sleepless. Her work was selected from among more than 346,000 submissions as "the most outstanding work submitted in your region."
This is her first publication.
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Poetry extracts from I Think of You When I Hold My Breath:
when you bathe the shed in orange sun, my dear lover,
tell me from up there in the sky, what does it look like?
only at midnight can I see it.
***
because as far as I can tell, we thought being human
was bottling up the animal inside us--
but if we bottle up the civilization, what do we become?
***
bury me with my eyes open so that I may give my blindness to the earth.
and I swear, one day, hyacinths will sprout from my grave,
fragile as glass and just as pale as my broken bones.
***
it seems that the sapphires have visited us at midnight
and did not call ahead.
***
irrational thoughts and insecure doubts
pepper my mind,
seasoning my flaws.
maybe, maybe not, maybe.
***
so, if you want to, maybe we can figure out
if the spirits that move through our veins
are cooperating
***
