Picking Flowers Pricking Thorns: Poems For The Soul

In Picking Flowers Pricking Thorns, Jazmine DeWees gathers a collection of some of her most intimate pieces and vulnerably displays them before you, like art on the walls of a museum, in hopes that you would enjoy the tapestry of her heart beating outside of her chest. Her work isn't just poetry. She stands firm in the complexity of this raw intersection of beauty and brokenness. This collection is a testimony of survival, a meditation on identity, and a declaration of faith in the midst of vulnerable, yet relatable challenges. She intrinsically weaves through the familiarity of struggle, identity and survival, creating connective tissue between her flowers and our thorns or her thorns and our flowers.Through piercing imagery and unapologetic truth, these poems trace the contours of womanhood, Blackness, family, and faith. They wrestle with inherited trauma and generational curses, confront racism and systemic injustice, and expose the tender wounds of relationships, childhood, and loss. Yet alongside the thorns, Jazmine offers flowers: resilience, worship, gratitude, intimacy, healing, and the unshakable hope of a soul still reaching for God.Each poem is a snapshot of tension — between pain and peace, scars and survival, silence and voice, despair and deliverance. Together, they form a bouquet that is both jagged and beautiful, a reminder that growth often comes with both blossoms and barbs.Picking Flowers Pricking Thorns is not just a poetry collection. It is an invitation to witness what it means to bleed, to bloom, and to believe... and this is what makes this kind of craftsmanship simply beautiful. Read more