The Tax of Being Awake: Poems on Love, Rage, Memory, Boundaries & Becoming

Some things do not deserve a thank-you note.The Tax of Being Awake is a bold, intimate poetry collection about what happens when a woman stops confusing survival with living. Jacqueline Daniels writes from the complicated middle-grieving what cannot be restored, laughing at a body under new management, remembering the history preserved at kitchen tables, desiring people she has finally learned not to choose, and setting boundaries with teeth.Rooted in Black womanhood and reaching far beyond it, these poems move through love, rage, family, grief, neurodivergence, aging, cultural memory, pleasure, resilience, and reinvention. Daniels honors the people who showed up, confronts those who only knew how to take, and refuses the easy lie that every wound must become a lesson. Sometimes pain remains pain. Sometimes survival is messy. Sometimes the most honest spiritual response is, "Oh, hell no."Tender, profane, hilarious, sensual, and unflinchingly honest, this collection is for everyone who has been praised for being strong while quietly paying the cost of that strength-for anyone learning that ability is not consent, softness is not surrender, and starting over is still continuing.This is not a book about becoming untouched by life. It is about becoming fully yourself because life touched you-and refusing to thank every hard thing that brought you here.For every reader ready to stop dimming, stop apologizing, and take up the space their life has earned, The Tax of Being Awake says: My turn.