This Is My Life

This Is My Life is a book of seventeen poems — the first poetry in the Spreuke library, and the earliest writing in it. Where the reflections reason toward their conclusions, these poems declare them: each opens with its message in a single line, then makes the case in verse. The title poem carries the sentence that later became a motto across the author's books — this is my life, and I will live it — and the rest map the ground that stance was taken on: self-belief kept up without apologies, critics who become mimics once the flying starts, fake friends drawn to the mysterious, death as the common denominator that makes everyone equal, and the man in the mirror as the one consultant worth interrupting a quarrel for.

The voice is younger than in the reflections — quicker to talk back, openly proud of surviving what it survived — and that is part of the record: written in 2014, these poems are the self the later books reason from. A few turn outward, to remembering the people who shaped a life and to letting others live theirs; most stay close to one person deciding, in verse, exactly whose life this is.