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.
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, Sullivan left 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.”
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—Maggie Smith,
New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
“Instructions for Traveling West chronicles a literal journey, a leave-taking, but what Joy Sullivan celebrates in this book is a homecoming. Here, in poems of hope, risk, freedom, vulnerability, and transformation, we see a woman wholeheartedly embracing herself, ‘a woman willing to feed herself—light, bread, joy.”
praise for instructions for traveling west
—Holly Whitaker, New York Times bestselling author of Quit Like a Woman
“Instructions for Traveling West is remarkable for how it captures this moment, the essence of this weird middle time—and for how thrilling it is to read someone who is noticing, who is saying despite every terrible thing, ‘This place is great, I want to be here, what a thing to be alive.’ Joy Sullivan will make you want to live the way Mary Oliver makes you want to live. You read this to remember.”
praise for instructions for traveling west
—Kate Baer,
New York Times bestselling author of
And Yet and What Kind of Woman
“This empathetic, honest, and intimate collection is chock-full of poems reminding the reader to love earnestly, live freely, and pay attention.”
praise for instructions for traveling west
—Maggie Smith,
New York Times bestselling author of
You Could Make This Place Beautiful
“Instructions for Traveling West chronicles a literal journey, a
leave-taking, but what Joy Sullivan celebrates in this book is a homecoming. Here, in poems of hope, risk, freedom, vulnerability, and transformation, we see a woman wholeheartedly embracing herself,
‘a woman willing to feed herself—light, bread, joy.”
—Lyndsay Rush,
Mary Oliver’s Drunk Cousin on Instagram
“A blistering, tender reflection on desire and delight that will soak right into your skin.”
“Instructions for Traveling West is remarkable for how it captures this moment, the essence of this weird middle time—and for how thrilling it is to read someone who is noticing, who is saying despite every terrible thing, ‘This place is great, I want to be here, what a thing to be alive.’ Joy Sullivan will make you want to live the way Mary Oliver makes you want to live. You read this to remember.”
—Holly Whitaker,
New York Times bestselling author of
Quit Like a Woman
