We are delighted to announce the publication of the heart is a holding, the debut poetry collection by TLC Free Reads alumna Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson. The collection has won praise from Raymond Antrobus and CA Conrad, and is available to purchase now from burning eye books.
Here is what the publisher says about the collection:
‘the heart is a holding’ is Lateisha’s debut pamphlet and is a visceral journey through birth, life and death cycles across personal, intergenerational and ancestral time. Moving through landscapes of spirituality, earth futurity and memory it is a calling to embody the current moment through the ever present hauntings of social-climate injustices and apocalyptic reality. Lateisha seeks healing through the lens of survivorship and legacy. As transformation. As the gathering of love, holding and dignity for Black mothers, earthworkers and care-givers beyond gendering, beyond racialisation, beyond this time.
Weaving life-giving reflections, love letters and funeral rites together as imprints of belonging. Expressing multidimensional ways of being, across the realms of Blackness, queerness, disability and working-class immigrant and diasporic experience as conduits to call in the powers of lineage, survivorship and purpose.
And here is Lateisha on her experience working with TLC:
“My experience of a TLC Power Hour session with Aki was genuinely transformative. The session helped me come into close contact with the resistance I felt regarding the editing process of my pamphlet. Aki really helped me to identify what the resistance was about on an embodied, emotional level so I could move through it in practical, caring way. The session helped me understand that the resistance was self-protection.
It’s scary to put a book out in the world, however exciting the opportunity! It was really powerful to work with someone who had an understanding of the ways trauma can impact a writing process, and therefore came with nervous system support and care as part of their coaching practice for writers.
In only one hour, I came away with a embodied sense of being supported but also very practical tools to help me identify the support and resources I needed to get through the next phase of my writing. That led me into a space of safety and enabled me to find the joy in my offering again. I wouldn’t have been able to finalise my process in the way I did without the mapping that the session with Aki offered, and for that I am deeply grateful.”
TLC Free Reads offers lower-income and marginalised writers bursaried support to access professional editorial services including editing, mentoring, one to ones and consultancy. You can read more about the scheme here.
Order ‘the heart is a holding’ here.
