I've been reading quite a number of poetry books lately, and what I've come to realise is that every one is a unique and personal journey experienced by each author. Every person's love life is different. We all meet our partner in different ways. We have different thoughts and different intensity of feelings, and because we have different perspectives of seeing life and facing the world, we describe the love, the pain, and the aftermath of our heartbreaks differently.
Unless you've written your own collection of poetry about your own experience, i'm not sure we'll ever find a poetry book that would capture our exact thoughts on every single page, or describe what we went through with the perfect words. Even so, what's beautiful about it all is that we can still find ourselves relating to one another between some of the stanzas, or discover that we've faced similar situations or have had similar thoughts cross our own minds. What's even better, i think, is realizing that somebody else has managed to form the right string of words for you, to finally help you express what you've been feeling after struggling to do so for so long.
Heart is a beautiful collection of poems carefully divided into four parts; love, break, relapse and hope. This arrangement tells the story of a woman's journey through love, and I absolutely love how raw and honest it is. I know that the author is a Muslim, and I truly appreciated seeing her subtly describe the struggles and dilemma of sometimes needing to choose between our feelings and our faith when it comes to love. I found myself being able to relate to many of the poems, i think i ended up dog-earing more than half of the book because i just had to mark my favourite ones.
I think i probably went through a very similar journey, which is why I just love how Ayesha Khan managed to capture some of my thoughts so perfectly. Every time I found her words describing something i could relate to so well, i had to clutch my chest and either smile or wipe away silent tears. I realised after finishing the book that I had already personally experienced the first two phases (love and break), and that I am currently somewhere in between the third and the fourth phase (relapse and hope), so I definitely read this at the right time. The first part let me reminisce the love that I had experienced, which i realised later was actually my first love that i considered to be real, which explains why i am very deeply affected by my breakup. The second part allowed me to open up to myself; admitting how broken i became and how vulnerable I was. I couldn't relate too much to the third part, because it hasn't been too long since my heartbreak so i haven't gotten to experience the same kind of relapse. The final part definitely gave me hope to keep on healing and love myself enough to believe that I don't need that person to still have a happy life.
Complimenting most of the poems are adorable illustrations drawn by Ayesha herself. I love how cute, simple and relevant they are. I also love that this book doesn't only have poetry; in each chapter Ayesha also includes a few unique pages of memories, lessons and more personal thoughts about her personal experience. Even though they were more specific towards the person she wrote her poems for, somehow I could still relate very well with them. Other than that, in the middle of the book there are a couple of pages of cool and aesthetic designs of inspirational words. I feel like this book was complete with everything i needed to help myself move on from my recent heartbreak. I can come back and reread it whenever I need to cry about the past, and even when I need some inspiration to keep moving forward.
You can check out this website to buy a paperback or ebook of Heart by Ayesha Khan. Thank you so much Ayesha for this beautiful collection, it has inspired me to pick myself up from my pit of sadness and continue to heal :) Also, follow Ayesha on Twitter and Instagram at @inscribedink, she is such a lovely and friendly person!
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