The Shatter Between Heartbeats is not a poetry collection. It is a psychological event. A descent into the raw architecture of the human mind, where trauma is not described but embodied-where anxiety tightens like a vice, depression seals every exit, and survival is carved line by line without anesthesia. Written by E.T. Vale and edited by Amir Kapoor, this groundbreaking anthology explores the lived experience of mental illness through twenty-four unflinching, interconnected poems. Each piece grips the reader like a synaptic misfire, looping and rupturing in form, mimicking the patterns of a brain caught in survival mode.
Perfect for fans of Ocean Vuong, Anne Carson, and Sylvia Plath, The Shatter Between Heartbeats breaks the boundaries of poetic language to reveal what it means to live inside a mind that won't shut off. This collection doesn't flinch-it bleeds while exploring the author's truth in a way only he could.
Structured like an anxiety attack and culminating in a poem composed entirely of the final lines of every piece before it, the book itself is recursive, hallucinatory, and unforgettable. It offers no comfort, no clean endings, no recovery arc-only truth, spoken aloud.
Featuring standout poems like "The Choice That Was Never Mine," "Hold On," "Blood, Sand, and Bleach," and the devastating closer "The Sum Continuum," the anthology walks the line between poetry and psychosis, making it a must-read for survivors, seekers, and anyone who has ever felt undone by their own thoughts.
Whether you're searching for powerful mental health poetry, exploring themes of trauma, PTSD, depression, addiction, or simply craving a book that dares to feel, The Shatter Between Heartbeats is a literary landmark. It doesn't ask to be understood-it demands to be felt.
This is poetry for those who don't want a silver lining. This is for the ones who lived through the storm-and kept going.
Trigger warning: Contains themes of suicide, war, mental illness, and trauma.
Industry Reviews
Publisher's Note - Open Kimono Publishing
"The Shatter Between Heartbeats is not a book. It is a removal.
E.T. Vale granted us full publishing rights with a single request: that we follow every aspect of his design without compromise. Not to protect the work-but to survive it. This was something he needed to release. Memories he needed cut out from himself. To burn, so he could keep living.
When we first read it, we stopped reading. We witnessed it. It didn't feel like a collection of poems-it felt like a bystander's account of a private war. We weren't editors. We were there. Once you've witnessed something like this, silence becomes complicity.
The spine on the paperback is misaligned by instruction-objected to by us, but ultimately honored. An unspoken reference to an injury of his own. The matte hardcover remains unblurbed, as he insisted. The 24 poems trace a cycle that mirrors each hour of a day lived on repeat-without end.
This doesn't challenge literary convention. It rewrites it. Nothing was changed. Nothing was added. Nothing was smoothed for comfort. Our editor certified it. We honored it.
We knew releasing this would go against the rules of commercial publishing. But this was never about a product. It was about transmission. About letting readers feel what he feels. To see how the world arranges itself in his mind-and how that mind fractures and reforms, hour by hour.
This book may not be easy to hold.
But it is necessary.
Some books are written to be read.
This one was removed to be understood.
Once you witness it-you witness something rare: truth.
Not the polished kind. The kind that trembles. The kind the world keeps trying to bury.
We are the calloused hands fighting off the shovel."
-Open Kimono Publishing
