New Year’s Revolutions is a project over five years in the making. When I was doing the @yesterdayinpoetry project every day on Instagram, I started in July doing a daily poem about whatever topic I came up with. But towards October I was getting bored that first year so I started a few themed months. I did scary poems for two weeks each October. I did some thankful poems sometimes during November. I did some Christmas poems around the holidays.
But the best two months were January and February because I created my New Year’s Revolutions (NYR) and Massacre of Love series.
NYR started as a way for me to stop mailing it in and quickly became something I looked forward to all year. The first year, I started with a list of prompt words that were part of the “revolution” family. You’ll see a lot of those words used shortly. The goal was to still write my poem each day but use my prompt word as inspiration.
It seemed to resonate – my biggest count of likes was in January (almost 30 once!)
I didn’t really know what I would do with them and was content to let them live on the Insta account. But when I was languishing on The Sweet Nothings I started to pull all the NYRs into a single document and quickly realized I had enough for a book if I wanted to publish it. So, I started to cull the herd and pick just the best ones, and that’s what you get here. You’ll see several with the same title and (x) number after. That’s their proper name. E.g.: if you see Defiance(3) the title is Defiance Three. That would also be a chronological key.
Anyway, now you know what you are reading. I hope it inspires you to fuck shit up and make a better world for you and everyone you love. Don’t settle.
