Naked & Healing (Paperback)

This volume is full of the big and small moments that make life beautiful, and heartbreaking, and simple, and complex. Poetry about mundane experiences like having a flat tire, surviving life in a service job, the joys and challenges of parenthood and childhood, and how we cope with change. The thread that touches most of the poems in this collection is relationships. Relationships with our children, our parents, friends, employers, ourselves, our memories, the earth and the world at large. At the end of the day, relationships are what life is about. The experiences we have in life would be vastly different if we had those experiences with different people.

The poems in this collection also touch on existing in our current world, and what it can teach us about ourselves. Poetry about what is “in the moment” found a place in this book.

As Amba said in a recent interview
“I think that poetry allows me one place where I can be in the moment. By nature, I am a worrier and a planner. So I am always somewhere in the past (what did I forget or what could happen) and somewhere in the future (what needs to happen, what is the schedule, is everything accounted for). With poetry, I hear something or see something or feel something and I write about it then. I know if I don’t capture it in that moment I will probably lose it or what I write won’t be as powerful. I will have lost the exact phrasing that came to me.”

And the message she wants everyone to know: you are not alone in any of this.