Category: Poetry Forms
Announcing! Red Threads and Silver Linings by Adele Evershed is Now Available
Celebrate today as the new release of Red Threads and Silver Linings, A Woman’s Life in Haiku, One Bloody Drop at a Time!
Red Threads and Silver Linings is a haiku exploration of the female lifecycle, tracing womanhood through the intimate terrain of the body. Inspired partly by Jaques’ “All the world’s a stage” speech in As You Like It, Evershed moves through menarche, puberty, menstruation, fertility, conception, miscarriage, pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum life, motherhood, menopause, and aging. Her short-form poetry illuminates the quiet power, vulnerability, and resilience held within the body’s cycles.
The collection catalogues the blood that marks each stage of women’s biological lives – periods, miscarriages, birthing blood – threading these experiences to seasonal change, the moon’s rhythm, and nature’s wider cycles. The “red threads” are crimson tides, blossoming flowers, the blood moon: metaphors for menarche’s first shock, miscarriage’s sadness, labor’s endurance, and postpartum’s complexity. The “silver linings” gather later pleasures – reblooming azaleas, HRT’s sticky petals, a bruised peach scented with second chances. Grief and loss coexist here with endurance, humor, desire, and deepening self-knowledge.
Organized into sections like It’s Just a Period She’s Going Through, Childbirth and Other Horrors, and An Old Wife’s Tale, the book blends the personal with the mythical, the natural world with the biological. Daughters and mothers share pages with ghosts of earlier selves and ancestral echoes. Through haiku’s precision, the result is a map of womanhood both grounded and lyrical.
At once meditation and celebration, the collection offers poems that are tender, raw, and unflinchingly honest – honoring the shifting landscape of a woman’s life from girlhood’s first flush to menopause’s soft letting-go, and the humanity found in every bleed, every change, every reckoning of living in a woman’s body.
Catch this video of my interview with author Adele Evershed.
Prefer the Podcast?
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About Adele Evershed
Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the Valleys for the American East Coast. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and Touchstone Award winner for an individual poem, she is co-editor of Thin Skin Journal. Her work has appeared in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, The Heron’s est, Presence, Prune Juice, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry collection Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press), the short story collection Suffer/Rage (Dark Myth Publications), three novellas-in-flash, and the haiku collections Pressed Between Palms (Nun Prophet Press) and They F#% You Up Your Mam and Dad (Cuttlefish Books). When she’s not writing, Adele can be found drinking PG Tips tea and trawling thrift shops for teacups to add to her collection.
Poet Talk: My Soul to Keep by Sarah Merritt Ryan
I met with Sarah Merritt Ryan recently to discuss her upcoming book My Soul to Keep.
Have a listen or watch and listen.
About the Book
My Soul to Keep is a deeply personal and spiritually resonant collection of sonnets that explores what it truly means to walk with God through the darkest seasons of life. Written primarily from a Christian perspective, these poems offer an intimate portrait of faith — not as a smooth and effortless journey, but as a living, breathing relationship that is tested, stretched, and ultimately strengthened through suffering.
At the heart of this collection is a profound truth: hardship does not have to destroy us. Long-suffering, when carried in faith, becomes a crucible that deepens our connection to God and shapes us into something more resilient, more compassionate, and more whole. Faith here is not static — it ebbs and flows, wavers and steadies — and that honest portrayal makes these sonnets feel achingly real.
Many of these poems are written from a woman’s perspective, and several speak with quiet courage to the wounds left by broken relationships and the pain inflicted by others. Yet even these most tender and difficult places are held within a larger story of survival and grace.
What ultimately distinguishes this collection is its vision of the final destination of enduring trial — not merely survival, but praise. To give thanks to God in the aftermath of suffering is portrayed here as both an act of healing and an act of liberation. Praise cleanses the heart of bitterness, loosens the grip of the past, and opens the soul to receive what God has always intended: wholeness, peace, and renewed purpose.
My Soul to Keep is for anyone who has ever wrestled with God and refused to let go.
Get your copy: https://www.prolificpulse.com/sarahmerrittryan
About the Author
Sarah Merritt Ryan is a North Carolina native who writes from a Christian perspective on faith and suffering, and this collection of sonnets is her first book. She is a member of the United Church of Christ. Her faith has helped her survive many trials, including her battle with schizophrenia.
Through patience, a refusal to give up, and believing there could be a bigger picture for her life, even when she could not see it, she persisted and did make a full recovery, going on to get married, become a mother, and rebuild her career. She has been symptom-free for 14 years while on medication for life, after having three psychotic breaks in two years.
Through a desire to help others have a better emotional experience than she did, she is now also a writer, speaker, and advocate for emotional recovery from psychotic disorders. Her writings on mental health include poetry, blogging, memoir, fiction, and academic publications.
She has a blog on Psychology Today called Healing Mind: My journey to cognitive and emotional recovery, which is used as training material for resident psychiatrists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) Schizophrenia Treatment and Evaluation (STEP) Program and is republished on the UNC School of Medicine website. She is a Certified Peer Support Specialist who works for the UNC Center for Community Excellence in Mental Health.
She also blogs for Nami.org and Life Effects, a blog by Teva Pharmaceuticals. She has been published twice in Writer’s Digest on topics related to mental illness. She has been published twice in the academic journal, Schizophrenia Bulletin Open. She has a full-length memoir in the works.
She is also a public speaker and NAMI volunteer who was named Hometown Hero in 2024 by the North Carolina Women’s Courage Professional Soccer Team, Lenovo, and NAMI Wake County for her mental health advocacy work in the Raleigh-Durham area. She is also the Parent Advocate for the Wake County Public School System, representing parents living with mental illness.
She has a degree in Journalism from UNC-Chapel Hill and a Master of Science degree in Communication from NCSU.
Her website is sarahmerrittryan.com
Book Launch
If you are in the Raleigh, North Carolina area, you are welcome to join the Book Launch. Registration
How could I possibly deny this opportunity to give this scoop-Pun intended
ANNOUNCEMENT!! Laura Stamps has a New Release! “Doggie Haiku-A Novella in Haiku for Dog-Lovers” is Now Available!
What’s “Doggie Haiku” About?
Cindy is a shopaholic. She’s also the “Treat Lady.” There’s always a treat in her pocket for the neighborhood dogs. But what she really wants is a dog of her own. One day she sees Hazel at the local shelter. A tiny, frightened, senior Chihuahua. And she can’t resist. However, walking a dog in the snow is not her thing. So she applies for a transfer at her job. Soon Cindy and Hazel are on the road to the Florida office. To blue skies, sandy beaches, sunshine, and those Southern men. (Oh, my!) Let the adventures begin…
What are Reviewers saying about “Doggie Haiku?”
“In this charming novella, award-winning poet Laura Stamps gallops her way into our hearts one Haiku syllable and one cute doggie at a time. Her pace is fun and intentional. I read Doggie Haiku first thing this morning. It was a delightful way to start my day. Marvelous storytelling. Beautiful, fun, and very well done. You’ll laugh and smile!”
– Zaneta Johns, Author of Encore: A Collection of Poetry
“Absolutely LOVED it! This new novella by the super Laura Stamps is a delightful treat. Full of doggy fun and an owner’s adventures, it’s not to be missed. All the cute pictures will make you laugh out loud too. Don’t wait. Get it now!”
– Laura Besley, Author of 100neHundred
“This was such a fun read! If you want a dog (or to find true love), this charming and funny novel written in haiku is for you. You’ll smile through the adventures of Cindy (a certifiable shopaholic) and Hazel (her Chihuahua). Read it whenever your spirits need a lift!”
– Nolcha Fox, Author of Words into Elephants
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