The Hard Shit

Nineteen witness poems documenting what breaks humans. Not the stories we tell ourselves about resilience or meaning-making. Just the unadorned fact of difficult experiences: terminal diagnosis, dementia's slow erasure, chronic pain's daily grind, treatment-resistant depression, aging parents, miscarriage, suicide's aftermath, job loss at fifty, loneliness that doesn't resolve. Third-person perspective throughout. An empathic witness documenting bodies that betray, distances that can't be closed, weight that accumulates without relief. The poems refuse comfort. No resolution grafted on, no hope where there isn't any, no false connections between experiences that don't actually relate except through the fact of being hard. Compressed prose and sculpted white space. Each piece finds pattern in what resists optimization, applies operational precision to experiences that can't be databased. The structure that remains is architecture, not decoration - breathing room around what can't be explained away. This collection doesn't perform sentiment. It just documents that these things happen, they mark people, and the marks don't optimize away.