For a poet, words shape into feelings, thoughts and ideas to sculptures of who we are. Dimonique Boyd’s “This Is How I Feel: My Life In Verse” lets us be passengers on her personal journey in poems that unfold from her pre-teen/early teen years to today.

While the experiences are unique, the themes and emotions: vulnerability, strength, shyness, fear, sensuality, confidence—resonate with her audience.

Her adventures in poetry began as a pre-teen girl creating raps to keep up—and sometimes pass up—the neighborhood boys. As time progresses and “This Is How I Feel” unfolds chronologically, Dimonique brings us into familiar territory:

I tell my secrets to my pen
Who shares them with a page.
They discuss my love and loneliness.
They listen to my joy and my rage.
What I can say to no one else,
They always understand. (“Lifelong Companions”)

Relationships are a theme that runs through the book. Crushes, love, progression of feelings, the emotional curve of love are part of the journey. In Chapter Two, This Is How I Feel About Crushes, the journey takes us from fearful devotion (“Crush”) to delicious anticipation (“Bittersweet Surrender”) to hopefulness (“Ode To The UPS Man”) In the next chapter, First Love, feelings evolve into a tangle of ideas, and Dimonique plays with both imagery (her man is “pregnant with your true existence” in “Your Seed”) and a mantra of devotion:

Let me tell you about your skin.
Your skin gives me a sweet tooth,
For it is the color of milk chocolate.
Your skin is soft and sensuous.
Like brown velvet…is your skin.
Let me tell you about your voice.
Low and deep,
Your voice is authoritative.
It says you are sure of yourself-
And that’s just plain sexy.
And invitation to debate… (“Let Me Tell You”)

Love and consequences are in constant change in “This Is How I Feel.” Sensual but not pornographic, love is visual and direct (“Word Play 2”), quiet and devoted (“Wanting”) or playful and unconventional:

I want you next to me
Undressing me
You’re hexing me with your eyes
I can’t wait
To hold your weight between my thighs
To leave my evidence
If they dust you for prints
I want all roads to lead to me
DNA swabs
Will return my heritage
Plus my brand of toothpaste
What I see and smell (“Pheramoans”)

Dimonique offers the reader a gift, in “This Is How I Feel,” and in frequent poetry readings around Detroit, playing with rhythms on the page and sounds in performance to draw the audience in. Feel the rhythms of “Unconscious” as Dimonique describes the frustrations and contradictions of Detroit:

I drive through this city
Plagued with potholes,
Liquor stores,
Crack whores,
And street corner memorials.
I give impromptu tutorials
To young men who can’t keep their pants up
And young women who can’t keep their skirts down,
Who frown upon using financial aid refunds
For books and supplies,
But seem so surprised
When they find themselves on the other side

Dimonique’s book is deliberately chronological, blazing a path of growth and observation about life. Honesty, sadness, and genuine affection (“I Hate Love”) are themes, along with wistfulness (“Beautiful”) and stark, real observations on perception:

Black is not my neighborhood.
I can pump my fist in the suburbs
And extend my hand to the ghetto
And help them over the wall
Or make it better where they are.
…Black is the Motherland,
Dreds, braids, and baldness.
Listen,
Just because I straighten my tresses,
I am not denouncing my roots.
I know the road my ancestors treaded to pave the way for me.
They made those sacrifices so that I could make choices.
Blackness is defined by each individual-
One shade of brown at a time.
Sisters and brothers,
Do not step on me because of the way I express myself
(“No Less Black”)

The introduction to “My Life In Verse” confesses that all poems are valued as part of the journey, all are loved no matter the maturity, as “her babies” in “Word Life.” In the true heartbeat of a poet, Dimonique invokes poetry itself time and again, in poems about life as poetry (“Original Pen” and “Birthwrites”) and as love itself, and the skill of a lover (“Word Play” and “Word Play 2”.)

Most of all, “This Is How I Feel: My Life In Verse” is a headlong leap into the journal of Dimonique Boyd. It is the little girl on the block with a talent for rhyme, a beautiful woman sometimes fearful and shy, sometimes wistful for the world to see her beauty, a love hopeful and devoted but strong against the emotions of romance. From beginning to end, you take a little bit, a bit more, and by the close you are friends with the poetry, and friends with the poet who has shared the secrets of a life in verse.