Burning Eye Books

Adaptive Strategies for a Sensitive System is a lovingly disordered field guide for surviving a world that keeps turning up the brightness. Disguised in the respectable badge of a diagnostic title, this is in contrast a poetic log of being too sensitive in a society built for the perpetually unbothered. From violent mornings to dreich late nights, Kate sifts through bedrooms, public transport, supermarkets, her Gran’s house, the surveillance-era optimism of mindfulness apps, and the wild terrain of her own mind- gathering softness, silliness, and unexpected wisdom along the way. With raw energy, wry humour and the stubborn softness of someone who has spent a lifetime feeling like a faulty blue tooth speaker trying to connect, she questions what’s innate, what’s inherited, and why everything seems to be “improving” faster than any of us can adapt. Connection, dislocation, loneliness, identity, social failure, and the strange hope that still glimmers beneath it all; this is a companion for anyone who has ever felt out of alignment with the world’s settings, and is still learning how to stay tender without falling apart.

the heart is a holding is a visceral journey through birth, life and death cycles across personal, intergenerational and ancestral time. A journey to call in states of repair and collective liberation. These words call us into relationship, inviting us into the role of witness, to set intention and feel into the echoes and desires of Freedom. Lateisha speaks into the waves, currents and somatic archive of the runaway, the fugitive, the marooned ones to help them return to their dreams and no longer shoulder the traumas of erasure. Each poem, text and world-building script is ritual, meditation to alchemise pain, loss and grief as intimate reflections of love, anger and hope through the medicine of connection.

At what point do we figure it out does it get easier will we find the answers will I feel okay?Caitlin O’Ryan’s debut collection is a journey of mirrors smashing and everything we have come to accept being called into question. With deep vulnerability and wit, she invites us to look inside of ourselves and to interrogate what we find there. Fuelled by the times that we are living in, her poems vibrate through the pages, grabbing you with a sense of urgency that says “you are not alone, I also feel this”.Taken from her live performances and featuring her viral poem ‘AT WHAT POINT’ which has amassed millions of views online and culminated in her being invited onto BBC Woman’s Hour, this book will light a fire in you that will continue to burn long after you have put it down.