Reviews with content warning for Mental illness - Where Hope Comes From: Poems of Resilience, Healing and Light

This is a collection of poems by author Nikita Gill which was written during the height of the pandemic.

It is a story of hope, kindness, resilience and at times serves to be a political commentary, as well.

I do recommend this short collection but the first half, especially, may not suit everyone’s taste. However, reading poetry is a deeply personal experience.

Read this one if you are searching for hope and a restoration of faith in humanity. And how to deal with ongoing struggles (e.g., the pandemic, politics, social issues) that arise daily. Personally, I loved the daily mantras and found them to be so valuable!

⭐️⭐️⭐️.75 stars

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stormy_ocean_waters's review

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challenging emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

5.0

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crystalisreading's review

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective relaxing slow-paced

5.0

I'm embarrassed that a book that gave me so much hope and comfort during a dark time could also take me so very long to review. I wanted to shout my appreciation for Where Hope Comes From by Nikita Gill from the rooftops, but perhaps for fear of not doing it justice, or because most of my mental energy was focused on adulting while surviving each day of a global pandemic, and didn't leave much energy for writing/ creating on my own, or some other combination of factors, I did not. Instead, I read this book, slowly, in the evenings before I fell asleep, cherishing each gentle, hopeful poem, relating to so many of them. I'm not a poetry connoisseur, but I found the poems in this collection lovely as well as relatable, full of imagery of nature and the human heart and the impact of life-changing events on individual humans. What do the giant patterns of civilization and pandemics imprint upon humans in general, and specifically on individual humans? What does it mean to stay indoors? To hope against hope to survive, and to see one's loved ones survive? To struggle with loss, and broken relationships while also being grateful for our own continued existence?

I love Where Hope Comes From so much that I immediately preordered a copy, and it is now a cherished part of my library, with pages dog-eared and highlighted, from Nikita Gill's reflective forward, to Reasons to Live Through the Apocalypse to A Reminder from Smaller Beings to How to Be Happy Again. But perhaps the poem which resonates with me the most is simply titled It's 2020:

"And everyone I know is on the verge
of breaking down.
Or has broken down.
Or has felt more tragedies

than the cosmos truly intends
for a person to feel.
And it's hard to say
This too shall pass,

Because we don't know if it will.
None of the clichés work.
Not while the world
stands still.

All we can do is pray.
All we can do is not blame each other.
And wish we had enjoyed one another
a little longer the last time we were together.

What is left but
to promise that when we next meet,
we will be kinder.
And fight for a better future together."

So I am enduringly grateful that #NetGalley and Hachette granted me a temporary digital advanced copy of #WhereHopeComesFrom that I could cherish and find comfort in during these continued pandemic years. I cannot recommend this highly enough. I had never heard of Nikita Gill, or her Instagram poetry account, prior to requesting this book, but now I am going to seek out all her work, both published and online, and hope you will do the same.

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onceuponabookcase's review

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective relaxing sad fast-paced

5.0

With her previous books, Nikita Gill has firmly claimed herself the place of my favourite poet, so when I heard she was releasing another book of poetry, Where Hope Comes From, about living during the coronavirus pandemic, I knew I had to have it. And while I adore Gill's poetry and have been so moved before, I didn't realise just how hard her latest offering would hit.

We're not yet on the otherside of this pandemic, we've not yet made our way through that tunnel, so Where Hope Comes From really effected me. My mental health has taken a number of hits over the past 11 months, and the grief has been so heavy. So reading this book brought everything - which is only really just below the surface, really - right back. Still stuck in this quagmire, Where Hope Comes From is at times really difficult to read, with poem after poem like a sucker punch. But there's something beautiful about someone being able to say what you can't find the words for, and in seeing you're not alone in what you're feeling and experiencing - a theme of the book itself. It's such a personal book in how Gill lays herself bare in talking about the difficulties she experienced through living in a pandemic, but those experiences are experienced by all, and so it's personal to us all.

But, as the title suggests, it's also a book of hope. It's a book of believing there is a way to the otherside, of coming out of this and living life as we once did. It's a book that reminds you of the importance of all the things you took for granted before, of friendship and community and love, but it also reminds you of the things you once thought important but aren't at all. It's a book of new perspectives, or hardship and opened eyes, and how hope can give you the strength and the resilience to keep on going. It's astoundingly beautiful, and achingly raw.

While reading Where Hope Comes From, I was reminded very strongly of being back at school and reading the poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, of how their poems written in the trenches during the First World War are studied today to teach us not just about poetry, but about a very specfic period in time, and the experience of those soldiers. I strongly believe Where Hope Comes From will be Gill's equivalent in years to come, of living through the pandemic. She's captured this period of time in poetry, and long after we're all dead, Where Hope Comes From will be there, showing future generations what it was like. She's immortalised this time in history, and I feel because of this, it might just be her most important work yet.

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