🩵Book Review💙

 💙Book Review🩵

Book:- With Each Breath, I Count One Star

Author:-@iama_naivekook

Not a book about breaking—but about breathing through, and choosing to stay.

There’s a quiet honesty in With Each Breath, I Count One Star by Rajmoi Phukan that feels less like performance and more like presence. It doesn’t try to impress you with polished wisdom. Instead, it sits beside you—sometimes in silence, sometimes in fragments—and lets you feel what it felt like to live through those moments.

The poems carry the texture of lived experience—raw in places, but not chaotic. There’s intention in how the emotions unfold, even when they feel overwhelming.

As an auto-fictional and confessional body of work, the collection leans into multiplicity—the idea of “many selves” isn’t just a theme, it’s a structure. Different poems feel like they’re written by slightly different versions of the same person: one more fragile, one more defiant, one quietly observant. That layering gives the book its depth. You’re not reading a single emotional arc—you’re moving through a constellation of identities.

Importantly, this isn’t a heartbreak-centric collection, and it doesn’t trap itself in that narrow emotional frame. Yes, there is hurt here—but it’s not romanticized, and it’s not the destination. The emotional range is wider: self-reckoning, resilience, memory, and the strange, quiet ways we rebuild meaning.

Even the act of counting stars becomes less about longing and more about grounding—something to hold onto when everything else feels uncertain.

The poem “Clinging to Belief” deserves special mention—not because it’s louder or more dramatic, but because it shifts the emotional register of the book. It offers a kind of steady optimism that doesn’t deny struggle. It feels earned. Not naive, not forced—just a quiet insistence that belief, however fragile, is still worth holding.

What lingers after finishing the book isn’t sadness—it’s recognition. The sense that survival isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s as simple, and as difficult, as continuing to breathe… and counting something small, like stars, to remind yourself you’re still here.

This is not a book that asks for sympathy. It asks for presence. And if you meet it there, It gives you something quietly steady in return.

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