From When I Could Walk Hardcover – December 8, 2025

This is not just a poetry collection.This is a woman’s life — mythologized, dissected, resurrected, set on fire, drowned, recovered, and rewritten in her own hand.In this fearless, emotionally electric body of work, Shena Ellis transforms decades of ache, desire, conflict, memory, and revelation into poems that feel like weather systems. Her voice is at once tender and incisive, mystical and vulgar, philosophical and fed up, shifting forms the way the coastline shifts under a storm.Across these pages, she confronts the contradictions of humanity: the men who turn black to white overnight (“I have never met a man before…”), the friends who abandon without warning, the people who refuse to carry their own weight (“Some people choose to be a burden…”), and the internal voices that pull her toward doubt, courage, longing, or escape.She writes from places both literal and surreal:the quiet terror of being lost at sea (“I find myself more lost…”),the psychedelic near-death scramble at Sand Dollar Beach (“The Cup” — a masterpiece of cinematic fear)the eerie calm before a leap into darkness (“This place is peaceful and unnerving”)the chaotic summer crowds and her return to the redwoods (“Summer came with all its visitors…”)the self she continually meets in moments of regret, wisdom, outrage, and grace.Her poems shift from:confession — naked honesty without apologyrebuke — calling out cowardice, manipulation, and silencemythic metaphor — storms, oceans, birds, kingdomsplace-based memory — Fernwood, the redwoods, Big Surphilosophy & advice — the kind only a survivor can writeheartbreak — old, new, recycled, survivedself-recognition — painful, liberating, necessarylinguistic play — rhyme spirals, word puzzles, shifting rhythmsIn poems like “This is not a tale of sorrow” , Ellis releases her own narrative into the air — refusing despair, refusing ownership by anyone else, refusing even the idea that a poem must “mean” something. In “Mumbling shit while you’re walking away…” she executes a razor-sharp autopsy of cowardice. In “Motivation and intentions…” she dissects her own emotional patterns with surgical precision.And then she steps back, offering wisdom forged in fire:“You must not let your past be the thing that defines you…”A poem that reads like scripture for the self returning home.This book is for anyone who has ever felt too much, wanted too deeply, fallen too hard, stood back up too slowly, or learned themselves all over again.It is for the ones who laugh at funerals, cry in grocery aisles, love like a storm surge, and heal like a tide: repeatedly, relentlessly, on their own time.More than poetry, this is a blueprint for staying alive through the unbearable.A book for the wounded, the waking, the wandering, the wise, and all who refuse to die unheard. Read more