NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A vivid and inspiring poetry collection about what’s possible when we
heed our instincts and honor our intuition allowing ourselves to strike out for new
territories of love pleasure and peace. “This empathetic honest and intimate collection
is chockful of poems reminding the reader to love earnestly live freely and pay
attention.”—Kate Baer #1 New York Times bestselling author of And Yet and What Kind of Woman
First you must realize you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living. Then you must
commit to the road and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming apart. So
begins Joy Sullivan’s Instructions for Traveling West —a lush debut collection that examines
what happens when we leave home and leap into the deep unknown. Mid-pandemic Sullivan left the
man she planned to marry sold her house quit her corporate job and drove west. This dazzling
collection tells that story as it illuminates the questions haunting us all: What possible
futures lie on the horizon? What happens when we heed the call of furious reinvention? A
book for anyone flinging themselves into fresh starts Instructions for Traveling West grapples
with loss loneliness and belonging. These poems teach us that naming our desire is profound
alchemy. Each of us holds the power to set our own course forward. Expansive and
heart-opening—exquisite in their specificity galvanizing in their scope—the poems in
Instructions for Traveling West speak to the longing that lives within us all. They remind us
that “joy is not a trick.”