Book of Nouns: A Collection of Pages Turned

Book of Nouns: A Collection of Pages Turned is an intimate, unguarded exploration of identity, memory, and the lifelong work of staying honest with oneself. Across three sections--spanning the years 2009 to 2023--Dave Breslin stitches together poems, reflections, and fragments of thought into something that reads more like a living document than a static collection. These pages bear the weight of sobriety, fatherhood, aging, grief, self-doubt, and unexpected joy. But more than anything, they chart the slow, deliberate process of becoming--without the dramatics of reinvention, and without the ego of arrival.

Breslin's voice is deliberate and stripped-down, refusing decoration in favor of clarity. His writing lives in tension: between confidence and humility, discipline and self-sabotage, past and present. He writes of visiting graves both literal and metaphorical, of training his body as a form of penance, of choosing love and quiet over chaos and performance. The title speaks volumes--Book of Nouns--this is a collection obsessed with the real: names, people, places, objects, and the things we carry long after we've let go of everything else.

This is not a triumphant narrative. It's not a redemption arc or a how-to guide. It's something much rarer: a record of someone who's still doing the work, still asking the questions, still turning the pages. What emerges is not resolution, but resonance. These words remind us that peace doesn't come from erasing the past--it comes from learning how to live beside it.