This collection began as a confession I wasn't sure I could make.

The Journey of a Boy is not a celebration. It is not an apology. It is the honest accounting of a body learning what it wants, a heart making sense of what it feels, and a boy becoming something harder to name — not quite a man, not quite free.

These poems live in the space between desire and consequence, between tenderness and damage. Some of them were difficult to write. Some of them were the only way I knew how to survive what I'd already lived.

I wrote them for every boy who moved through wanting without a map. For everyone who mistook hunger for love, or love for power, or power for safety. For the ones who came out the other side a little undone.

Feel it. Write it. Survive it.

— Koris Bull