Instructions for Traveling West: Poems

A vivid and inspiring poetry collection about what’s possible when we heed our instincts and honor our intuition, allowing ourselves to strike out for new territories of love, pleasure, and peace.

＂This empathetic, honest, and intimate collection is chockful of poems reminding the reader to love earnestly, live freely, and pay attention.＂--Kate Baer, #1 New York Times bestselling author of And Yet and What Kind of Woman

First, you must realize you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living. Then, you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming apart.

So begins Joy Sullivan’s Instructions for Traveling West--a lush debut collection that examines what happens when we leave home and leap into the deep unknown. Mid-pandemic, Sullivanleft the man she planned to marry, sold her house, quit her corporate job, and drove west. This dazzling collection tells that story as it illuminates the questions haunting us all: What possible futures lie on the horizon? What happens when we heed the call of furious reinvention?

A book for anyone flinging themselves into fresh starts, Instructions for Traveling West grapples with loss, loneliness and belonging. These poems teach us that naming our desire is profound alchemy. Each of us holds the power to set our own course forward.

Expansive and heart-opening--exquisite in their specificity, galvanizing in their scope--the poems in Instructions for Traveling West speak to the longing that lives within us all. They remind us that ＂joy is not a trick.＂

Joy Sullivan received an MA in poetry from Miami University and has served as the poet-in-residence for the Wexner Center for the Art. She has guest-lectured in classrooms from Stanford to Florida International University and is the founder of Sustenance, a community designed to help writers revitalize and nourish their craft. Read her thoughts on the creative life in her Substack newsletter, Necessary Salt.