Please Pick Me

Book excerpt: In a garden of a thousand other volumes, my little yellow book with its earnest plea and hopeful flowers on the cover sits waiting for you to pick it up. It's got a heart it wants to give away. These haikus, poems, and prose pieces are about the miracle of being wanted back by someone we want, the desperation of hoping they'll fight harder when they waver, the rawness of seeking reassurance that we are loved as we are, and the tenderness we feel when we're sending love out to others—all those moments when we are making our need to be accepted plain and praying, please pick me. This new, compact Philippine edition features the same four chapters of poetry as the original, with a little sneak peek into my in-progress collection of pandemic poems, some things don't survive. I hope you open it. I hope it invites you to be open too.