Spotlight: Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love by Regina Louise
What if the way back to yourself begins with telling the truth?
Thank you to Regina Louise and Goddess Fish Promotions for including me in this virtual tour. In Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love, Louise brings poetry and prose together to explore love, survival, identity, trauma, and healing-and the work of reclaiming a voice after loss and betrayal. Rooted in lived experience and mythopoetic inquiry, the collection invites readers to consider self-love, resilience, and the journey back to the self. I'm glad to shine a spotlight on it today.
Book Details - Unladylike by Regina Louise
Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love By Regina Louise
on 09/01/2026
Genres: She Said So Press
Formats: Paperback
Pages: 186
Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love by Regina Louise is a powerful poetry collection that explores self-love, healing, identity, and emotional truth through a mythopoetic lens. Blending memoir, poetic storytelling, and spiritual insight, this debut collection invites readers into a deeply personal and universal journey of reclaiming the self after trauma, heartbreak, and abandonment.
At its core, Unladylike is a book about love—not the kind conditioned by approval, performance, or survival—but love as reclamation, authorship, and embodied truth. Through lyrical, unflinching poems, Regina Louise examines the ways women and survivors are taught to contort themselves to be chosen, and what it means to return to oneself instead. These poems move through themes of inner child healing, emotional resilience, codependency, desire, grief, and personal sovereignty, offering readers both reflection and recognition.
Structured as a poetic cartography of becoming, this collection traces the evolution from silence to voice, from self-abandonment to self-devotion. Each piece acts as an excavation site where memory, the body, and identity intersect—revealing how lived experience can be transformed into meaning, agency, and self-trust. With recurring imagery of lace, mirrors, altars, and the body as archive, Unladylike creates a symbolic landscape that is both intimate and expansive.
Perfect for readers of contemporary poetry, women’s empowerment, and trauma-informed healing, Unladylike speaks to those navigating personal growth, recovering from toxic relationships, or seeking deeper self-understanding. Fans of authors like Rupi Kaur, Yrsa Daley-Ward, and Ocean Vuong will find resonance here, while discovering a voice that is wholly original and unapologetically its own.
This is more than a poetry book—it is a reclamation. A remembering. A return to the self as home.
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Reader Resources
Reader Info at a Glance
| Format | Hybrid collection of literary poetry, prose, personal reflection, and aphoristic reflections |
| Themes | Love, survival, embodiment, identity, trauma, healing, self-love, and reclaiming one's voice |
| For Readers Interested In | Emotional healing, spiritual growth, women's voices, and personal transformation through storytelling |
If you're drawn to poetry that gives language to difficult feelings, you may also enjoy
All the Words I Kept Inside by P J Gudka.
Quick Take: A hybrid poetry and prose collection exploring love, survival, and the journey toward healing and reclaiming the self.
Things to Know:
- Hybrid form. The collection brings literary poetry together with prose, personal reflection, and aphoristic passages.
- Emotionally weighty themes. The collection touches on trauma, loss, betrayal, grief, and healing.
- A focus on self-reclamation. The work considers identity, embodiment, self-love, and finding one's voice after hardship.
Excerpt
This excerpt, "Say Her Name, Yours, and Mine," reflects on identity, voice, and self-recognition.
Say Her Name, Yours, and Mine
for Celie, for the girl on the 24 Divisadero, for all of us
Who taught her to bankrupt herself
back into her own disremembering-
to shrink inside the sound of her own name?
But I call her by her name. Celie.
Not by what Mister said.
Not by the nothing she thought she was.
I call her holy.
I recognize her as my own emulate,
mama,
sister,
auntie,
grandmother,
Jezebel,
and Sapphire,
The forgotten-about ones.
Because, like all of them (us),
she wrote letters to a God
she wasn't sure existed.
Because she kept speaking,
even when no one answered.
Kept showing up,
and up,
and up-
Until that sacred day she stood and said,
"I may be poor, Black, I may even be ugly-
but dear God, I'm here,"
the day every woman who had been erased
stood up inside her.
The day I stood up.
My smallest exiled self-commanding like Moses-
until her spine / mine / all our spines
reached a Heaven of our own creating.
Miss Celie
touched her own face,
and I touched mine
on the 24 Divisadero bus heading away from Haight,
and we found ourselves beautiful.
Here's a little more about the author behind the collection.
Meet the Author
Learn more:
Website | Amazon | Goodreads
Where to Buy
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Tour dates: September 21 to December 7, 2026. To see the full schedule of stops, visit the
Goddess Fish Promotions tour page.
Giveaway
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