While the title might sound like a spin-off of the well-known memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert, this collection acts as both memoir and catharsis. Bilott had always thought of writing poetry as her “private obsession,” but she had never thought to publish what she wrote.

A retired teacher and widow, Bilott had a hard time adjusting to living alone after her husband’s death, which was quickly followed by the death of her mother. So she began to write down her thoughts in the form of poetry to better process them.

She showed her work to a small group of friends who encouraged her to get them published, which Author House eventually helped her to do, and she found that writing them gave her hope each day, and she wanted to share them with others so they too could find hope.

“For me, writing is part of my daily existence, a thread running through all my experiences, circumstances, changes. I find that I cannot separate one from the other,” Bilott writes in the short biography section on the back of her book.

She uses this mentality to construct her book in such a way that the reader feels that they are reading poems that she daily writes, sort of like peering into her daily diary.

The book is divided into three sections: “Love,” “Grief” and “Hope Possibility,” with one untitled poem per page. This set-up makes it easy to just pick up the book and read a few poems or to sit and read the entire book in a very short sitting. One can use them like daily doses for thought and easily flip through to find a poem that mirrors one’s current feelings.

In the “Love” section, she struggles with the love she feels for her husband and the love she continues to feel after he has gone. In one poem she writes, “For now, all I have is all I need. / At the end of the day / the experience was nothing / like the dream. / At the end of the day reality / is not like anything I hoped for. / But it’s all I’ve got.” She speaks of a universality of human emotions, of struggling to reconcile dreams with reality, which most of the time proves fruitless. Bilott confronts her new reality of being alone, of her life being “nothing like the dream” but “all I’ve got” with a sort of brave acceptance.

The “Grief” section tells of her experience living with her husband while he was in the process of dying. “When someone you love is dying,  / You know it — / And hope only makes it worse. / Living is better than dying / Until it is not." Anyone who has had a loved one in their care or close to them die might understand this sense of wanting to hold on and have hope, but knowing that sometimes letting go is the best option.

The “Hope Possibility” section looks to the future and rounds out the end of the book. As you read, you see Bilott progress through different stages of happiness, grief, and come to hope that she can move on and still make the most of her life. She writes, “I look at what I can do today / And find that I can move forward. / Nothing is ever outside of us, / It’s always inside of us.” She draws on this found and cultivated inner strength to help push through hard times and comes out with a fresh perspective.

Though Bilott might use a lot of clichéd metaphors in her poems, she introduces some new ideas about expressing very common, human emotions. Her journey is evident in her writing, especially if one reads the book from start to finish in one sitting. Page by page, one can see her inner thoughts and dialogue evolve and find that her feelings are very much like ones you have yourself experienced.

While she presents some very lovely sentiments, younger readers may not be able to fully grasp her feelings about certain circumstances because they have yet to experience them. Love, grief and hope are intensely complex emotions in relationships and life in general, thus the more living that is done, the more acquainted one becomes with these feelings. Still, the poetry collection is a short, quick read that makes you pause in your daily routine to give these intense emotions — love, grief, and hope — some time and thought you normally might not.

Reach Staff Reporter Kristin Yinger here. Follow her on Twitter here.