Check Yes for No - Paperback

by Avery Arbegast (Author)

This book is a map of all the things a person is told to hide. The hunger. The fear. The wounds that never earned names. The stories that were taken instead of given.

Across these pages you will find poems that move through ruin and rise, through the long shadows of survival, and into the fragile light that waits afterward. The collection explores desire in its sharpest forms, the quiet violences people learn to live with, the ways power twists itself inside relationships, and the cost of wanting a life that does not hurt to carry.

Some pieces speak of trauma without looking away. Some pieces name what others try to bury. And some pieces turn toward hope with the soft steadiness of a first morning after a long storm.

This is a book about people who broke and kept going. About lives that bloom on their own strange timelines. About the sweetness that grows in unexpected places. About the future you cannot see yet but are already walking toward. If you have ever rebuilt yourself from the inside out, if you have ever carried a hunger that the world told you to deny, if you have ever survived something that should have ended you, these poems will meet you where you are.

They will not rush you.

They will not lie to you.

They will walk with you until the light returns.