Confessions of a Stutterer by Tyson Higel

A heartbreaking collection about what it means to live a life half-spoken. As a fellow stutterer, these poems resonated deeply with me. With unflinching honesty and a writer’s command of the language denied him verbally, Tyson lays bare the reality of living with a stutter: the daily humiliations, battles and frustrations. But, among the sadness, there is hope and acceptance, too. In Tyson’s own words: “Go through life in all your beauty.” We can take away no greater message.

–Iqbal Hussain, author of Northern Boy, to be published June 2024 by Unbound Firsts.

Tyson Higel’s much anticipated poetry book Confessions of a Stutterer offers insights into the efforts of expression, the necessity for connection, and the significance of reflection.  Each line is a confession, life breathed into it, a familiar scene from a foreign planet.  It left me wanting to read more from this budding poet; you will too.

During the post-pandemic era, when rebuilding relationships and resharpening conversation skills are at the forefront of our minds, Tyson reminds us to take it slow and walk in grace with ourselves and each other.

The collection compares moments caught in the vacillation of a “stammer and stutter but musically flutter;” each poem Higel’s sculpted has a particular haecceity.

The perspective is from the writer.  It is raw, intimate; at times shocking, and at others, the lines gracefully offer an unexpected perspective you didn’t know you needed.  Whatever you might think you know about a subject, Higel offers you a different way to know it.

To pull a phrase from Higel’s poem, The Hardened Ground of Shame, this collection is “utterly honest.”

–Shannon Laws, author of You Love Me, You Love Me Not and publisher of the zine “Corridor”