Poetry Collections
Victoria Ashleigh Rose is a poet whose work explores the tension between heart and mind, engaging themes of shadow work, disability, anxiety, self-love, and inner child healing. Her writing reflects on memory, naivety, and the evolving self, tracing the fragile and resilient threads of personal transformation. Drawing on rich imagery and metaphor rooted in the natural world, she often returns to the intimate landscape of a private garden from her childhood, at once neglected, overgrown, silently dying, and defiantly in bloom. Through this living metaphor, Rose examines the endurance required to remain wild and untamed, to grow for oneself without recognition, and to find meaning in the intimate act of self-becoming. In her work, nature serves as both mirror and witness, holding space for cycles of decay and renewal, and affirming that growth, even when unseen, is still profound.
Daughter of Shattered Roses
Poetry collection on familial trauma and inner-child healing
“A daughter’s testimony written from estrangement.”
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Daughter of Shattered Roses explores estrangement, generational trauma, and narrative reclamation from the perspective of a daughter raised within an emotionally complex and unknowingly flawed family. Written from a place of distance and clarity, the collection confronts lived experience and conflicting memories of childhood. While the family holds one narrative, the speaker asserts another, refusing to relinquish her truth for the sake of harmony.
The rose serves as a central metaphor throughout the collection. Drawing from the author’s family name and a childhood rose garden that functioned as a site of escapism and solitude, the imagery intertwines beauty, pain, and survival. The roses are shattered to reflect divorce, estrangement, and emotional fracture, yet they remain symbols of endurance and stubborn regrowth through the weathered cracks.
The poems intentionally balance rawness and extended care, seeking growth through self validation combined with self-accountability and forgiveness. The collection was written primarily as an act of personal healing and inner-child acknowledgment, but it extends outward as a revelation for readers who grew up in environments shaped by emotional neglect, gaslighting, or scapegoating.
The arc of Daughter of Shattered Roses moves through rupture, evaluation, emotional forgiveness, and self-reclamation. It affirms that healing does not require denial and that reclaiming one’s story is a necessary act of selfhood.
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This work draws from both the author’s lived and fictionalized experiences, as remembered and interpreted through subjective perception. Names and identifying details have been changed or omitted, and some events are presented symbolically or as composite experiences. The perspectives expressed are personal and reflective, and do not claim to represent objective or comprehensive records of any individual or event.
This work is presented as an artistic exploration of themes including trauma, memory, and family dynamics.
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This collection is written from the perspective of an estranged daughter navigating the aftermath of growing up in an emotionally complex and wounded family system. Victoria writes from a place of distance and nostalgia, examining family shaped by fracture, misunderstanding, and unmet emotional needs. The poems are raw, explicit, and deeply metaphorical, while remaining intentionally careful in their handling of trauma. Each poem is crafted to hold pain without reproducing harm.
Nature and roses serve as a primary metaphor, drawing from the author’s family name as well as a childhood rose garden that was often a site of escape for her. Nature became a refuge and witness to the little girl navigating a sense of isolation and loneliness. The roses are “shattered” to reflect the reality of a broken family shaped by divorce, estrangement, and emotional alienation, acknowledging the kind of complexities that often cause more harm than is recognized.
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A core tension in the collection arises from conflicting narratives of the past. The family holds one version of childhood, while the speaker holds another. The poems confront lifelong gaslighting and scapegoating, asserting the legitimacy of the speaker’s lived experience without seeking to persuade or reconcile at any cost.
While the collection was written primarily as an act of personal healing and a way to honour the author’s inner child, it extends outward as a potential point of recognition for others. The work is intended to resonate with young and adult children who grew up within emotionally neglectful or complicated families, offering validation where language has often been denied.
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“I’ll split every branch of this family tree
to reveal the rot underneath.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I would think about myself this much if I hadn’t been watched so closely as a child; if I hadn’t grown up being analyzed, criticized, picked apart in real-time by people who said they loved me, while keeping a running tally of all the ways I was wrong. I wonder if that’s why I still keep a list close to my chest of all the ways that they were.”
“The wind would hear my secrets; carry them off with no consequences—that I was the garden’s girl. That I would share every story whispered to me by bugs, and birds, and all the motherless creatures. All the daughters of roses, and limitless wanderers whose homes were in the dirt, feet nestled in the weeds.
Because stubbornness is instinctual for those growing untamed, unpreened, alone.
And there is beauty in the abandoned.”
“Maybe the trauma doesn’t go away just because we want it to. Maybe it creeps in, and bursts out, and we never know why.
Maybe we even take it out on our daughters.”
“Sometimes there really is love in choosing, there is safety in trying, there is progress in healing. Therapy, poetry, journalling, texting. Clinging to relationships like they’re my real family. Jealousy, abandonment, screaming, don’t leave me, I swear I’m healing, I swear I’m healing.”
“It's just because I was never taught how to hold a heart Between these bleeding palms And not swallow it.”
A Is for Anxiety
Poetry collection on mental health and disability
“This book is for people who have been over-diagnosed and under-accommodated, have been called resilient when they needed peace, or have been told their struggles are personal failures by well-meaning people.”
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A Is for Anxiety is a poetry collection centered on disability, neurodivergence, and resistance to stigma. Addressing OCD, ADHD, anxiety, insomnia, and other sleep-related disorders, the collection confronts the alienation experienced by disabled people who are expected to function without accommodation.
The work blends confessional poetry with reflection, humor, darkness, prose, and formal experimentation, mirroring the unpredictability of disabled life. The collection resists cure narratives and the moralization of productivity, challenging the assumption that disability is a personal failure to be overcome.
The title references a key poem that addresses the overwhelming accumulation of diagnostic labels and the gap between being named and being understood. This tension recurs throughout the collection, emphasizing how easily society categorizes disability while failing to provide meaningful care.
A Is for Anxiety speaks to disabled readers who have felt misunderstood by family, institutions, and culture. It insists that disability is not a flaw to be fixed but a reality that deserves recognition, accommodation, and dignity.
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“A is for Anxiety” is poetic, confessional, and reflective, while also functioning as resistance against stigma and alienation. The poems span from funny, dark, serious, painful, lyrical, and experimental, reflecting the unpredictability of disabled life, challenging narratives that frame disability as weakness or inconvenience, and asserting disabled experience as complex, legitimate, and worthy of care.
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The collection is written for neurodivergent people who have felt misunderstood, unaccommodated, or invisible within families, institutions, and society. It prioritizes recognition over explanation, and offers solidarity.
The title references a key poem in which Victoria names multiple intersecting diagnoses at once, capturing the weight of accumulated labels and the alienation that follows.
Beyond internal experience, the collection critiques external systems, including societal expectations, family dynamics, and institutional neglect. Disability is shown as something shaped and intensified by inaccessible environments and moralized productivity.
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“A is for Anxiety is a resistance against the belief that disability can be “pushed through,” healed, or fixed through willpower. It rejects blame-based narratives and insists that disabled people are not failures for needing accommodation, rest, and care.”
“We’re allowed to be disabled, to take up space, to take our time. I’m allowed to be disabled, and it’s possible to thrive. I can be disabled and the right people, the right spaces, will not be disappointed in me for it. “
“My mother’s political beliefs are that life doesn’t owe us anything. Life doesn’t owe us kindness, or courtesy. Life doesn’t owe us equality, fairness, or justice. We either earn it, or we don’t. We’re either lucky, or we’re not. But if we earned it, it’s never because we were just lucky in life, and if we’re unlucky, it’s because we didn’t earn it.
My political beliefs are that we should make life good for everyone, to the best of our collective ability, And apparently that’s a hot take.”
“I designed my room for dopamine. Books and art and clutter. Jewelry and meds and stuffed toys from childhood. My friend is on their way, nowish. But my room is messy, and my phone is pretty, and it’s all too much dopamine and not enough.
Too much and not enough. Always.”
Love and Other Insecurities
Poetry collection on love and co-dependancy as a young adult
“For the people who are finally learning to love deeply without disappearing.”
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Love and Other Insecurities is a poetry collection that examines romantic love through the lens of anxious attachment and its interference with self-worth. The poems trace the boundary between personal insecurity and relational vulnerability, working deliberately to untangle the two.
The collection’s voice shifts between observational, bitter, soft, heartbroken, and self-aware, reflecting the instability and introspection that often accompany deep emotional investment.
This is a book about people who love deeply and struggle with attachment such as poets, lovers, and especially those with avoidant or anxious tendencies. By acknowledging that love can coexist with harm, Love and Other Insecurities offers an honest and compassionate portrayal of emotional entanglement.
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This collection examines romantic love through the lens of anxious attachment and its interference with self-love. The poems explore how intimacy can amplify insecurity, revealing the fragile boundaries between devotion, fear, and self-abandonment.
The voice of the collection moves fluidly between observational, bitter, soft, heartbroken, and self-aware. This tonal variation reflects the instability inherent in attachment, capturing moments of clarity alongside emotional collapse.
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The poems revolve around people, vulnerability, hope, obsession, insecurity, and longing. This book speaks to those who recognize themselves in patterns of distance, desire, and fear.
At its heart, the collection asserts that love is not always enough. By resisting narratives that position love as redemptive by default, the poems make space for self-preservation, boundaries, and emotional accountability.
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“I can’t be convinced that we’ve all felt this. That invisibly love torments and flourishes and transmutes between us, and that we let it go. Because how come no one has ever warned me not to?”
“We lie in bed and rust And listen to the drunk symphony Of our bitter, lazy, life
And I wonder when we knew It was over.”
“You are not the lover you promised me, And so we laugh together at our relationship’s mortality; At its decay. Because no one thinks about the melting of snow As winter’s death.”
“In the world I belong in, you keep an album in your notes app titled “words from her…”
And you can’t spend a week away from me without seeking my warmth in the lines I’ve written of you,
And you can’t leave me again without tracing the tear-stains in all the past heartbreaks you’ve left me with.
In this world, you are swept back into every moment we fell for each other, like I am,
and I do not have to learn how to heal
on my own.”