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I am Maria: Reflections and Poems on Heartbreak, Healing, and Finding Your Way Home by Maria Shriver
I had the pleasure of seeing Maria at Godmothers in Summerland, CA, during her recent book tour for this wonderful book!
This collection brings together poems she has written over the course of her lifetime, preceded by a thirty-five-page introduction she calls "Reflections."
As both a Kennedy and a Schwarzenegger, she long struggled to feel she had a voice that was truly her own—except when reporting the stories she covered as a journalist. From childhood on, she was surrounded by people living in the fast lane of achievement. Now, in her early seventies, she's able to slow down and be present. She has given herself that permission.
Shriver believes that her poetry gave her back her voice and that she was finally brave enough to launch it into the world. She says, "I had always been a writer, writing news stories and articles and gratitude journals and books. But now I started writing from a deep place within, and the kind of writing I was doing—deliberate, uncompromising, truthful—was poetry" (p. 29).
In essence, her eye-opening epiphany was this: "No matter how fast you run, life will catch up with you—and when it does, you have to decide if you're going to push it away or pay attention, stop, and reboot. Poetry has been my way of rebooting."
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