What remains when the person you thought you were begins to disappear? SHIFT is a poetry collection about identity, perception, transformation, and the strange work of becoming. Moving through deserts, oceans, stars, fire, fractured language, and remnants of the self, these poems explore the distance between who we are, who we believe ourselves to be, and who the world tells us we should become. Across a landscape of mirages and buried histories, the boundaries between discovery and invention begin to blur. Names become definitions. Perception alters reality. Fear becomes something inhabited. The self is dismantled, reconstructed, and encountered again in unfamiliar forms. At its center, SHIFT asks what it means to claim ownership of an identity that is always changing. If we are shaped by memory, language, expectation, and the people around us, how much of ourselves is truly our own? And when those structures fail, do we recover who we were—or become something new? Strange, introspective, and speculative, SHIFT is a meditation on selfhood, agency, destruction, reconstruction, and the meanings we create from what remains.
