The Size of Your Joy by Elise Powers

An intimate poetry collection for women navigating motherhood, exhaustion, grief, and the quiet hunger for joy. Elise Powers writes with honesty about the contradictions of womanhood — the love and the loss, the resilience and the weight of it all.

Drawing from the birth of her daughter and the complicated relationships between the women in her life, Powers traces how ideas of beauty, desire, and shame pass quietly from one generation to the next, and what it takes to break those cycles. She writes about the longing for belonging and autonomy that women are so often taught to set aside, and imagines what it looks like to stop doing that.

The Size of Your Joy holds sorrow and joy together, not as opposites, but as forces that shape the stories we inherit and the lives we choose to build. A collection about reclamation, and about finding joy not as the absence of struggle, but as an act of defiance.

Published by Central Avenue Publishing. ISBN: 9781771684408.