This chapbook of poetry explores the dark side of love — what happens after the happily ever after. It is Erin Zarro’s second poetry chapbook from Turtleduck Press, following the release of Life as a Moving Target in December 2010.
Click here for a poem from the chapbook.
Buy the book from Amazon here, or the ebook for Kindle (software is free) here.
What are readers saying?
If ever there was a truly poetic soul, Erin Zarro deserves that acknowledgement. Without Wings takes the reader on a soulful, deep, and mournful journey through love lived and lost, dreams captured and stolen away.
I’m in love with some of the phrases this poet uses. She somehow managed – with certain pieces – to take a little peek into my own soul and incorporate the connection into her book, her poetry. J.C. Johnson
If ever there was a truly poetic soul, Erin Zarro deserves that acknowledgement. Without Wings takes the reader on a soulful, deep, and mournful journey through love lived and lost, dreams captured and stolen away.
I’m in love with some of the phrases this poet uses. She somehow managed – with certain pieces – to take a little peek into my own soul and incorporate the connection into her book, her poetry.
“Don’t listen to the sound
of my heart as it snaps in two
And I bleed rotten love on the floor.”
How can something so vividly written with such violent imagery be so irresistibly beautiful? This book has reminded me of how much I love poetry.
“Thoughts sliced open” haunt my own thoughts now. What would happen if I chose to slice open my own thoughts? What depths would I reach, once again introspective and appreciative of such intense emotion?
“See me without skin
Without preconceptions or edges
To define.
Peel layers off my skin, as I am,
See underneath, down to my soul,
See the light that makes me.”
I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an appreciation for beauty, heartbreak, healing, and words that reach your core. If this is you – you will love the poetry of Erin Zarro. – Jennifer Crystal-Johnson, Goodreads
The poems in this book are hauntingly beautiful. So many love poems focus on the good, but this book focuses on what happens when things go wrong. It really resonated at times.
I’m not really a fan of poetry but I do recommend this. – Kit Campbell, Goodreads
Her poetry has a way of painting pictures with negative space– that is to say, the things she withholds from the poems, rather than what she puts in them. She dives right into the depths of emotion without hesitancy, and she has arranged the poems within to create a rhythm throughout the chapbook that flows as well as her poetry itself. As she moves further into the breakup, where you begin to question everything that happened in the past, the poems become scattered and wordier. Sometimes the lines are long, like prose, and at times like little shards of glass.
Erin has captured all the loneliness, the disappointment, and regret of divorce in “Without Wings.” It’s not an easy read. She does close with a little glimmer of hope — the idea that she has truly healed and found herself — but the eternal romantic in me would have appreciated one more poem about finding new love. Nevertheless, it’s powerful in its brevity and anyone with a broken heart may find catharsis in its empathy. – S.M. Reine