My first ever full length poetry collection called Looking for Wild Things will be making its debut in the world on November 28, 2021. Looking for Wild Things traverses life and a long distance love affair during the pandemic from April 2020 to April 2021. It is an internal investigation of the external world. It is about transformation, rebirth, and finding one’s voice in the deafening silence of a world falling apart.

Here are what a few reviewers had to say about the book:

“In her book Looking for Wild Things Aleathia Drehmer wastes no time employing the most important device known to the lyric narrative, raw and vulnerable honesty; emotional and social. These are poems that map a life being renovated under duress of a pandemic from a front line perspective. In these pages the reader will find with wisdom comes transformation, from resistance to acceptance, from confusion to understanding, all set in a landscape only this poet could render to the page, and all without “bandaids or feigned positive thinking.” The reader of this book needs to prepare for all the difficulty and work required for extracting truth and beauty from “the wild things,” but that work, and the fine crafting of that work, is conjured into life within these pages.”–Paul Corman-Roberts, Bone Moon Palace (Nomadic Press)

Rooted in the brutal joy of the body and nature, Looking for Wild Things is a meditation on the time we spend isolated but not alone. This powerful collection carefully wraps the past in the present and lays it at our feet as a reminder for the future. We are not alone. We were never alone. That is both the beauty and the price of living. —Mattea Orr, author, The Quiet Room

In Looking for Wild Things, Aleathia Drehmer writes from the inside out of a sturdy heart that has been there and back again. To friends who have gone dark, to broken lovers who can’t be mended, to the wild tending of one’s own, ever widening and ever healing wounds, Drehmer’s poems are like a knowing and gentle hand placed onto a shoulder in those darkest of hours. It’s precisely when words seem to fail us that poems step in and lay claim to us. Such are these. Here lies a kind of wisdom-writing that finds a way in and through all the “trauma speak” to the lively, ever burning light we each carry inside of us, not always knowing it’s there and ours. For anyone who has ever felt like their lives were coming up empty, Looking for Wild Things testifies on behalf of all that is full, unbroken, and beautiful in each last one of us. —James Diaz Author of This Someone I Call Stranger and All Things Beautiful Are Bent

Be on the look out for upcoming links to where you could purchase this collection as the drop date gets closer. Thank you to Steve Cawte from Impspired for taking on this project and believing in my work.

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