The Journey to Mara Prose: A Poetic Testimonial (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798883473509)

Everyone asks why she stayed. No one asks who taught her to wait.

Before he ever said hello, she was already fluent in the only love she'd been taught: the kind that calls but never comes. A fourteen-year-old girl in her good shoes, standing at a window, giving every passing headlight her father's face.

That girl grew up. And the man who found her knew exactly what he'd found.

The Journey to Mara Prose: A Poetic Testimonial, Book One of the Mara Prose series, is memoir told the way no one dares to tell it: as evidence. In poems that read like a psychological thriller, Mara Prose traces how a girl becomes the perfect target long before the predator arrives. The childhood that trained her to carry everything. The family that called her difficult for sounding the alarm. The community that named her lucky while her body screamed not this. The two weddings she called off. The four ultimatums that cornered her yes. And the wedding day her own memory refuses to hold, where the groom had to walk the aisle to collect a bride whose spirit had already left the building.

This is not a book about a woman who didn't see the signs. This is the story of a woman who saw every one of them, and the world that taught her to apologize for looking.

Written in layers that reward every reread, these poems hide their revelations the way her marriage hid its truth: in plain sight. The disappearances that always ended exactly when her healing began. The rescues that arrived for emergencies he created. The love that came beautifully wrapped, with nothing at the center. By the final section, you won't be reading her story. You'll be a witness to it. And witnesses can be called on later.

For every woman who was handed a life and told it was a gift. For every reader who has ever been loved in the lobby and laughed at in the vault. For every book club ready for the discussion that follows the women home.

The testimony stops where the truth changes questions, and one eye, long closed, finally opens. What that woman does next is another book.

This one is where it all began.

Let the record show.

Book One includes a full author's reflection and "Questions for the Women at the Table," a complete book club discussion guide. The journey continues in Book Two: The Woman I Answer to Now.