The Life and Times of Good Vibez: Mixtape: Poems By Keley Johnson

This isn't a mixtape you listen to once and forget. It's the one you make in the middle of something - heartbreak, or the beginning of it, or the long walk back to yourself after both.The Life and Times of Good Vibes was written in real time, across a love that I entered, left, and found my way back into, changed. These poems don't pretend that's a straight line. Side A is the fall - reckless, physical, certain. Side B is the static, the truth catching up to the fantasy. And the bonus tracks are what's left after the record stops: not a woman healed, exactly, but a woman rebuilding out loud.I didn't write these to be pretty. I wrote them to be true - about desire, about grief, about my ancestors riding in my blood, about the particular exhaustion of being a Black woman who is allowed to be strong or soft but rarely both. If a few of them made me wince putting them on the page, that's usually a sign they belong in the book.Play this front to back, the way you would a mixtape someone made you at 1 am. Some tracks you'll skip on repeat listens. Some you'll play until you know every word. That's the album working exactly as intended.Good Vibez were never the absence of pain. They were what I made out of it.