Joy Sullivan's poetry book is the year's best

(hands down)

Sunil Bhandari

Jul 13, 2025

This book refuses to leave me.

After I had gulped ten poems from it, I searched for Joy Sullivan on Instagram and sent her this message.

"Joy,

I’m just a stranger. In India.

Smiling, with my eyes wet, as I read, re-read your book, your poems.

Wondering how you break hearts and heal them - both at the same time.

Thank you for the gift of your peerless words and your generous heart.

Sunil"

This beautiful person immediately replied back:

"this made my day. thank you, sunil. 🙏"

Joy's poetry captures the beauty of transience and lets it settle into our hearts the way we let the winter sun spread over our bodies in grateful abandon.

She tells us how there are a million ways to say I love you, all of them without using those words; how loneliness with "all those days eating lunch in the bathroom will turn into poems"; how when you are a sensitive kid, and everything hurts, then other kids always seem to "shout in primary color instead of pastel".

This is what her bio says -

'Mid-pandemic, Sullivan left the man she planned to marry, sold her house, quit her corporate job, and drove west.'

What was she looking for? A home? The journey? Someone to run away from? Something to settle down for?

Whatever the reason, the result is this spectacular gathering of songs and thorns, of wounds which slip off the skin, and love which pierces deep, of memories which define her being to the ones who never stop loving her.

And as she journies through the country, slowly she finds herself traversing the landscapes inside herself. And her particular saga transcends to become that of every woman. Eve transfigures into Every Woman, the man following her in the dark is every woman struggling with predators, a hand reaching out at times of trauma is unexpurgated love when least expected.

And even as she gives of herself into every experience, she never lets go of the thread which connects her to herself.

Her instructions for any journey are peerless.

'Give grief her own lullaby.
Fall for someone impractical.
Reacquaint yourself with desire and all her slender hands.
Bear beauty for as long as you are able.'

Joy notices the insignificant, and finds life messages wrapped in them. Starlings roosting on a power line, fanning feathers against rain; a friend finding her hair used by robins to build their nests; how each new word learnt in childhood is like a 'candle you brandished in the dark'.

Even at their most profound, her book is such an easygoing read that you want to take in the poems in one colossal gulp. Till suddenly you find you are hindered with a big lump in the throat. And you have stopped because the metaphors, the imagery, the feeling, the context, has suddenly got you, almost surreptitiously, and you're moved to tears.

Her poems are stories. Of moving in, and moving out. Of finding one's way in darkness and finding one's place in the sun. She says "some stories are so soft, they sting".

Even the most ordinary things find their magic in her words. She finds a "sunshine so bright it invents the lost word between holiness and magic". And then she proceeds to shelter grief in her throat. And we know, as a stab in the heart, what that means.

She watches with dismay the wreckage we wrought on all that's beautiful - how 'glitter gluts a fish', she talks of how William Shatner wept when he went to outer space and saw 'the curve of earth appearing poignant as a woman’s pelvis'. I literally weeped when she talked about a sea salp ('At first, I thought you a bubble or algae. Later, / Google said you’re a salp or sea grape— / a tiny ocean invertebrate with no spine to speak of, but still / a brain, a heart, a row of dots that work as gut') and what she involuntarily (and heartbreakingly) did to it.

As much as she celebrates the infinitesimal and unnoticed, she also self-examines her role in this universe - where she adds, where she detracts. She is, indeed, 'a library of little facts'.

And how, in spite of everything we do, to ourselves, to the ones we love, to this beautiful world, '(a)fter everything, how the world still insists / on being beautiful.'

Each poem is an episode from the landscape of her life - scraping her feelings about people, incidents, things, feelings. As she travels west, she carries the bruises, the slights, the memories of fallen lemons, of oceans, of boys who hurt, of kind hands, of the delight she gets in taking her body out to dinner,

It's an autobiography of alchemy. Because what is noticed, heals. Because what you see, enriches. Because Joy's touches words - and turns them to gold.