The Version That Remained: Poems of Middle Age, Grief and the Life Still in Progress (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798255711192)

There is a version of you who chose differently. This is a book about the one who didn't.

The Version That Remained is a poetry collection for anyone who has arrived at middle age and found it looks nothing like they planned. Forty-nine poems about the gap between the life imagined and the life assembled. About grief that moves in gradually and learns the house. About the friends who became hypothetical, the parallel self who chose faster, and the ordinary days that turned out to be the real ones all along.

These poems don't offer resolution. They offer something rarer - precise, unflinching recognition of what it actually feels like to be here. To be still becoming. To be the version that remained when all the others closed quietly without you noticing.

For anyone who has stood in their life as if it might still explain itself. For anyone carrying people who are no longer here. For anyone who has stopped waiting for arrival and begun, slowly, to make peace with the journey.

Forty-nine poems. Four movements. One life, examined with honesty, dark humour, and something that functions - eventually - like acceptance.

Still here. Which is not nothing. Which is, in fact, quite a lot.