What We Must Have Meant is Lilli Paterson's second poetry book and navigates themes of love, nostalgia, chosen family, grief, addiction and recovery.
The book is 5x7" softcover, with 130 pages. The beautiful cover was again done by Willow Star / @runfromcapitalism. This book features both beautiful poems intertwined with sketches and art.
Lilli spent four years writing this book and wants to share with readers the following: the writing of this book has been a great comfort to me. I need to tell you that because it might not seem so as you read. So let me now assure you, the writing of this book has dragged me out of bed, opened the curtains, found my keys, tied my shoes. And It has walked with me through addiction, grief, heartache (and other chronic illness) through recovery, reunion, death, and not one time throughout any of it did it so much as wince.
I hope you might find a sliver of that comfort in my sometimes uncomfortable re-tellings. I hope you find the soft love I had meant for it all to be. I hope this book, at its worst, can sit with you in the heavy dark of your living room at 2am, and at its best, can carry you to bed when you fall asleep on the couch.
- Lilli