;

;, my second chapbook (which is pronounced “Halfstop”), was arranged in Adobe InDesign during the first week of September 2025 and was finished by 2025 September 8; it is 26 pages long, excluding the front and back cover. I do not know the exact day I started it. I distributed copies of it to various teachers on September 8, including my English teacher, a Student Support teacher, and other teachers whose classes I did not have. I considered it “networking”.

The summer of 2025 was a very unique time for my poetical development. Writing in my personal diary on May 16, I predicted that it would be a “descent into madness” without any schoolwork to keep me out of my own head. Luckily, it was not, but it gave me the environment to take my first tentative steps towards a more abstract and impressionistic form of writing. Because of this, the material in ;—and even its name—are much more radical than virtually anything in Humble Beginnings. ; is also different because it is much shorter than its predecessor: it is only 26 pages compared to Humble Beginnings’ 50 (excluding the front and back pages of each).

The first thing I did was make a list of the poems I wanted to include; I always approach them as tracklists for an album. Since my school gave us all access to Adobe Creative Cloud, I was able to locate InDesign, and taught myself how to use it in about seven hours, making the first draft of what became Humble Beginnings. Over the next few days, I continued to edit it by fixing typos, rewriting sentences in the Author’s Note, and other small edits that I can’t remember. I would say that it was done by 2025 April 30, my sister’s nineteenth birthday.

;’s first poem, “What does poetry do?”, was inspired by “broken lyre”, written by Asha Futterman and published in the July/August 2025 issue of Poetry Magazine. Its last stanza says:

he died shoveling snow

that melted the next day

poetry makes nothing

happen

I consider this the first time another poet’s work inspired me to write new work, at least organically.

Page 15 of ; does something incredibly rare for my books—the second part of “;”, the title poem, is printed in mirror text. I arranged it this way for a few reasons:

• To visually contrast the traditional writing style (left side, page 14) with the experimental style (right side, page 15);

• To physically break the book into halves, with the first half being more traditional still and the second half being more experimental;

• To make the reader work to decipher the message by holding up the book to a mirror or taking a photo and inverting it; and

• To reinforce the different message/approach of the second part of “;”.

Some of these poems were also written in the Notes application on my TI Nspire CX II calculator; the ones I can remember are:

• “the rat race”

• “SECRET #5226”

• “this poem was written”

• “brilliance”

• “lies”

“Document 012 (“Life”)” was written during the ceremony for the Ferguson Library’s 40th Annual Literary Competition on 2025 May 4; I was published in its anthology for that year as the Grades 7-8 Honorable Mention for “In Memory of the Unknown Soldier”, a poem from Humble Beginnings.