by Josie Balka
First published 2025
Josie Balka transforms fleeting social media moments into lasting poetry in her first collection. The radio personality and viral TikTok creator gathers over eighty poems that examine the gap between what feels urgent now and what matters over time. Her sparse, direct language captures the sting of jealousy, the weight of family bonds, and the complexity of loving your own body. Balka writes about falling into love and climbing back out, about grief that sits heavy and joy that surprises. She returns again and again to nostalgia, that shifting lens that changes how we see our past. Some poems have already found their audience online, while others appear here for the first time. Each piece aims straight for recognition, the moment when a reader thinks "yes, this is exactly how it feels." The collection moves between apathy and hope, between the person you were and the person you're becoming. Balka's work speaks to anyone who has felt the pull of memory or the confusion of wanting what someone else has.
Genres: contemporary, poetry, 21st-century, social-media
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: falling-in-love, found-family, unreliable-narrator
Period: 21st-Century
176 pages · Hardcover · S&S/Simon Element