A lot of books want to be understood. This one wants to be heard.
One of the first things you notice in Ashley Lynn Gannon’s Poems from a Borderline Heart is how often it changes who is speaking to whom—and how that shifting address becomes its own emotional technology. The collection opens with a poem that begins like a confession but keeps a careful distance: “I know a girl,” the speaker says, “Who died long ago.” It’s a haunting premise because the girl is not literally dead; she is, in a sense, the speaker’s former self—someone lost to untreated anguish, to misunderstanding, to the demonizing shorthand people use when they don’t know what else to do.
That distance matters. Throughout the book, Gannon uses “she” the way someone might use a railing: not to avoid the truth, but to approach it without falling. The “she” poems allow a kind of witness—the self watching the self, documenting the moments others miss. Even the cruelest details appear not as spectacle, but as evidence. When the girl is questioned about visible wounds, she replies, “It was just the cat,” a line that carries the familiar double-bind: tell the truth and risk punishment, or lie and keep bleeding alone.
But the book is not only “she.” It is also “I,” and—most powerfully—it is “you.”
Gannon’s “you” is never one thing. Sometimes it’s the reader, drafted into intimacy. Sometimes it’s a parent, an ex, a therapist, a younger self. In a culture that often misunderstands Borderline Personality Disorder as manipulation or drama, Gannon’s shifting pronouns do something quietly radical: they demonstrate complexity. A person can be many selves across a day. A person can need different kinds of language to survive different kinds of memories.
Take “Dear Little Me,” a poem that reads as a letter slid under a locked door. It begins with apology—“I’m so sorry / For everything I’ve put us through”—and then names the internalized cruelty so many trauma survivors recognize: “For telling you that you’d never be enough. / For insisting your worth depended on everyone else.” What follows is not a self-help slogan; it’s a re-parenting vow. “I choose to forgive myself,” she writes. And later, with a tenderness that feels earned rather than performed: “We made it… / We found peace, calm, and balance.” The poem ends the way a steady hand ends a panic attack: “It’s time for you to set it all down now. / I’ve got it from here. / Please trust me.”
In other words, the “you” becomes a bridge back to the self who didn’t think she’d make it.
Elsewhere, the “you” is rawer, angrier—an address aimed outward, toward the people and systems that refused to take her seriously. In “Do You Love Yourself? What Does That Feel Like?” the poem frames self-love not as a bubble-bath concept, but as a question complicated by diagnosis and history: “How can one be happy… / With the BPD, the PTSD… the depression / and the anxiety?” Then the poem does something rare in lyric writing: it lists symptoms plainly, without romantic fog—fear of abandonment, unstable relationships, chronic emptiness, paranoia/dissociation—as if to insist that the mind’s chaos has an architecture, that suffering is not just a mood but a structure you live inside.
And yet the poem turns. “If you ask me now,” she says, “I’d have a different story to tell. / I love myself, / More than I ever have before.” The “now” is important. This is not a book that denies the past; it’s a book that documents the painstaking creation of a present tense.
Perhaps the most surprising “you” in the collection is the one addressed with gratitude. In “More Than A Therapist,” Gannon speaks to “Stephanie”—not merely as a clinician, but as mentor, leader, inspiration, and friend. She doesn’t mythologize therapy; she specifies it: journaling, gratitude, affirmations, breathing, reframing thoughts. And then comes a line that reads like a hinge: “Because of you, / I know that I’m WORTHY”—a word made physical, tattooed, seen every day.
As a literary object, Poems from a Borderline Heart is intentionally direct. It favors clarity over ornament, emotional accuracy over cleverness. Its ellipses mimic the stop-start of difficult speech; its repetitions recreate the mind circling a bruise. And its best poems understand something essential: when you’ve spent years being told you’re “crazy,” “too sensitive,” “too much,” the most radical sentence you can write might be the simplest one.
“I am not broken,” she insists. “I am not bruised. / I am me / And unapologetically so.”
Read Poems from a Borderline Heart for its honesty—and for its craft: the way it uses “you” as both mirror and lifeline, turning address into a form of care.