Reviews

Praise for Leaves to Stay

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This book is full of Kristen’s memories.  It’s going to be a customer delight for the Readers to read them one by one just like opening a Pandora’s box.  She has started the book with Game of Life to end with She Grew.  The experience that everyone takes over the course of life!  This seemed very unique to me.

I am sure Kristen must be living or must have lived in Chicago because her poetry has all the minutest details of the City.  “Chicago, I did nothing wrong I played your rules I sang along good memories fade till they are gone I will disappear with them it won’t be long, as in The Game of Life and “Can you sit in the middle of Chicago without hearing a sound? Construction on every corner with the lake up ahead, can you sit in the middle of Chicago as in The Middle of Chicago are a testimony to it.

Her writings on life seem very apt and profound to me when I read her lines, “One step forward two steps back is this really where my life is at?  Sunny, warm, calm and free but then there is the moon’s mystery as in And so I stray.  “And now I am alive I live in this heaven of mine, don’t try to break me and stop my shine, I already know that it’s not my time let me be myself and I will be fine” as in Heaven suggest that finally she has found her own strength to move on in life and that nothing can stop her from doing so.  With every new experience, the less it matters, let the petals fall and let them fly free, I am traveling with my soul and that is all I need, I made it to the mountains I think I am really free” in her poem Mountains obviously talks about what it feels to be free after all the tribulations one suffers in life.  “Is there any life without Struggles?”  “Never” can be the best answer.  “Stabbing pain in my heart I think it was that way to start restless struggles lay deep within fighting myself and trying to win”

“I thought I was free from my past until a new one formed a cycle I thought had died had only been reborn” in her Reborn narrates a trajectory of the particular patterns once faces in life.  Every one of us goes through these patterns. I can much relate to her lines because I too, am no exception to this.  Eventually, I had to break the pattern to start afresh.

-Shubhaangi Kundalkar, Author of Justaju-In Search of Life