By the Shoreline: For the Soul That Craves the Peace Within
by Little Stickman
Partridge Publishing


"Another day
With coveted hopes and dreams
Pumping up the adrenaline rush
To start and proceed
To power and water up the seed"

Poems of confession, longing, hope, and light await readers in this collection. Love, and the loss it incurs, reaches apexes and bottoms that span distance in time, age, and geography in this book of spiritually insightful verses. The perplexities of romantic relationships become individuals with their own free wills, personalities, and determinations. With companionship and its complications at the forefront, poems like "bloom in drought" weave together with "quit" and "alive" to form an immeasurable, strong braid tied succinctly at its end with a single word of dedication—"you."

In observations that seem fresh from a high-quality photograph, this book captures love and romance at their most innocent. At its end, however, the reiteration of dedication and survival serves as a testimony to the power that one person can hold on another—how one person can shape and reshape another for the better, the worst, and then the best. This testimony appears in the poem "worth the wait": "Out of the billion souls existed / Out of the billion hearts that beat / Only one is created."

At its most symbolic, the collection is a commentary on poetry's effect on an audience, with each poem acting as its own manifesto about the reading and interpretation experience. Thus, the compilation functions at two levels—the personal and the literary. At the personal, it communicates what it is to have thin skin and a committed heart. At the literary, this book challenges the metaphysical and provides a new gateway into poetry for beginning readers and an often not chosen one for established fans of the genre.

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