Here is a book that breathes while it thinks. These poems move through grief, love, body, and history, then return with something usable, a language for naming what hurts and a practice for tending what holds. The voice speaks plainly and with heat, honoring mothers and mentors, the students who kept showing up, the neighborhoods that taught courage, the futures we keep trying to build. It refuses spectacle. It chooses steadiness. Page by page, the work asks a simple question with difficult weight: how do we keep living with dignity while the world keeps testing it.

Read this if you need company. Read this if you need a mirror. Read this if you are ready to tell the truth and still reach for tomorrow.

Jeffery C. White is an educator, researcher, and poet from Brooklyn, New York. He has taught in carceral, college, and K-12 classrooms, treating teaching as ethnography; a daily discovery of how people learn, heal, and build capacity together. His practice is grounded in racial equity and liberatory learning that lives beyond policy into the small, durable moves of a real room. His scholarship examines mass incarceration, reentry, and the quiet routines through which power organizes everyday life. His poems lean toward witness and repair, listening for where love and memory meet principled refusal. He is shaped by the thoughts of James Baldwin, Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz), W.E.B. Du Bois and Black feminist scholars who made study a communal act and a civic duty. He begins a Sociology PhD in the Fall of 2025.