Love, The Monster In The Closet, (Hardcover)

Love, the Monster in the Closet is a collection of poems detailing the struggles and triumphs of adolescence as a queer individual living in abuse. Many of the poems zero in on the isolation and hopelessness experienced by those who are deemed as "other" by their peers. That feeling of being villainized for not fitting in became the inspiration for the book being written by a monster, with "the closet" being a metaphor in two parts; one aspect of "the closet" is a call back to my own queerness and struggle to come out as I learned more about myself, while the other aspect plays into the idea that queer individuals are often kept out of sight and feared by those without understanding - just as naive children fear an imaginary monster in the darkness of their closet. The idea to format the title as the signature to a letter is a reference to the poems that are addressed to/written for specific individuals. All in all, Love, the Monster in the Closet is the journey of a transmasculine pansexual neurodivergent teenager as they try to navigate both high school and their abusive home life. It's the scraps of memories written by someone hoping they would survive long enough to live.