Vanessa Napolitano's The Lives We Had Before is a chapbook of poems written from the nostalgia, and grief, and comfort and joy of being in your early 40s. There are wolves, and ghosts, mix tapes, trains, a fondness for the North of England, and other exciting motifs running through this collection.
 
Vanessa Napolitano is a Yorkshire-based poet who has a knack for making ordinary moments into poems. She has published three pamphlets, including 'Various Magics' with Black Cat Poetry Press, and 'Birds & Bruises' with Kelsay Books. You can find her work in several anthologies and in journals such as Stanchion, Humana Obscura, and Ink, Sweat and Tears.
 
74 pages
Perfectbound paperback
To be published: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-90214-228-7
 
Praise for the lives we had before
"A great rush of inventive and witty poems, crammed with gorgeous ideas, and full of wonderful tastes and gestures that present us with the confetti of things left unsaid."— Matt Howard, author of Broadlands
"An exploration of girlhood and grief, of trauma and surviving, and how we ask the world to be gentler with our children and us." — Lynne Schmidt, author of The Unaccounted for Circles of Hell