The Hug I Wish I Gave You
A deeply personal collection about grief, family, love, survival, memory, trauma, and the words we sometimes understand only after the moment has passed.
Through poetry and creative nonfiction, De’Ashia Wallace writes directly into complicated memories and relationships, allowing tenderness, anger, loss, regret, humor, and healing to exist on the same page.
Some books tell you what happened. This one asks you to feel what remained.
The things we carry after the moment is gone.
The Hug I Wish I Gave You is a collection rooted in memory and lived experience.
De’Ashia Wallace writes about the people who raise us, disappoint us, protect us, leave us, shape us, and remain with us long after a moment has ended.
The collection moves through relationships, childhood, family trauma, addiction, violence, grief, romantic love, regret, survival, and the complicated process of learning how to live alongside what cannot be undone.
Some pieces are confrontational. Others are tender. Some speak directly to people who are gone. Others reach toward the living.
Together, they form a book about everything a person wishes they had said, everything they wish they could change, and the ways love can continue even when there is no way to go back.
A book about more than grief.
The poems move through deeply personal experiences while returning again and again to connection, memory, survival, and the people who leave their mark on us.
Family
The relationships that protect us, fail us, raise us, challenge us, and become part of who we are.
Grief & Memory
What remains after loss, and the conversations we continue having with people who are no longer here to answer.
Survival
Childhood, adversity, violence, addiction, protection, and the complicated strength required simply to keep moving.
Love
Romantic love, family love, protective love, lost love, and the forms love takes when it cannot fix everything.
Identity
The tension between where we come from, who others expect us to become, and the person we decide to be.
Healing
Not forgetting. Not pretending. Learning how to continue while carrying what happened honestly.
Selected pieces.
The collection moves through intimate personal history, relationships, family, loss, identity, and survival.
The Goodbye I Never Gave
The Departing Letter
Illusion / Magic Trick
Confrontation
Dot 9:21
The Hug They Should Have Gave You
The Rules
The Rabbit and the Bear
57 Questions for Johnny
This collection addresses difficult lived experiences.
The book contains discussion of grief, death, family trauma, domestic violence, sexual violence, substance use and addiction, childhood adversity, foster care, homicide, and other emotionally difficult experiences. Readers are encouraged to engage with the collection in the way that feels appropriate for them.
The work lives off the page, too.
Experience AJ P.R.’s spoken-word delivery and hear the voice behind the writing.
Some words arrive after the moment. They still deserve to be said.
Explore the collection, hear De’Ashia perform, or bring AJ P.R. into your organization, classroom, literary program, or event.