I Stayed Soft
Mayelana nale ebook
Tiny shards of broken mirror. Angry things that claw at ribs held together with needle and thread. Things sent to make her bitter, angry, and hard: all held at bay by a beating heart that stood at a crossroad and chose to stay soft.
I Stayed Soft is a poetry collection that moves through five reckonings — Silence, Fire, Softening, Return, Becoming — tracing what it costs a woman to remain open in a world built to close her. These are poems about rage that refuses to calcify into cruelty, a body relearning comfort and pleasure after trauma, and the quiet, radical choice to stay tender when everything demands otherwise.
For readers of Rupi Kaur, Nikita Gill, and Amanda Lovelace who crave poetry with a gothic, visceral heart. Unafraid of the dark, or the flesh that carries us through this world.
This is not a collection about surviving.
It's about what you can become on the other side of survival: loving, sovereign, and in control of your fire.
Mayelana nomlobi
Sarah Rockwood writes poetry, literary fiction and fantasy — with teeth. Cinematic, gothic, and best read by candlelight, her work draws on the beautiful things that bite: movement in the shadows, a glimmer of light on a blade, the woman who doesn't wait to be saved. Author, poet, and recording artist whose music has surfaced in film and television, Sarah makes gorgeous, unsettling things and hands them to you, trusting you'll emerge softer, stronger, and not quite the same.
