A review by bisexualbookshelf
Fragments of Wasted Devotion by Mia Arias Tsang

dark emotional reflective fast-paced

5.0

“I curl into myself and I touch the feral creature of my heart and ask ‘is there anything left to give’ and it howls ‘yes yes yes forever.’”

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book was released in the US on February 6th, 2025 by Quilted Press.

Mia Arias Tsang’s Fragments of Wasted Devotion is a blistering and tender exploration of love, loss, and the self that emerges from the wreckage. In this beautifully splintered collection, Tsang takes us through a series of almost-loves and broken promises, charting a journey that mirrors the haunting rhythms of queer heartbreak. With each vignette, she unearths the quiet devastation that appears even before the final break, capturing that liminal space where desire and pain collide.

Tsang’s writing is raw and confessional, laced with a vulnerability that cuts deep. Her prose often feels like a series of erupting reflections—each phrase, each sentence, like a glimmer of something real, something too raw to ignore. She has a way of making even the most fleeting moments of heartbreak feel monumental, wrapping us in the melancholy of unfinished connections. A key theme is the cyclical nature of love: the way it can start so brightly only to fade into something unrecognizable, or worse, something that never truly existed in the first place. There’s a fierce clarity in her exploration of queerness, self-worth, and the painful realization that not all love is reciprocal. As you read about Tsang’s heart breaking over and over again, so will yours. 

The collection’s brilliance lies in how Tsang intertwines her personal journey with the wider resonances of queer experience. Her story is one of self-discovery, not in the sense of finding new parts of herself, but in unlearning the idea that she was ever broken. The music of boygenius, MUNA, and Mitski echoes throughout, adding an emotional soundtrack to her pain and self-realization. These essays remind us of the quiet violence of unreciprocated love and the resilience needed to break free from it.

Fragments of Wasted Devotion is for anyone who has been consumed by a love they knew would hurt them, anyone who has given too much of themselves to something that was never meant to last. It is a visceral, poetic reckoning with the fragility of love, and the promise of healing that comes when we finally stop looking outside ourselves to feel whole. Thank you, Mia - you are the bravest. 

📖 Read this if you love: raw, confessional writing about queer heartbreak, self-discovery, and the complexities of love; introspective essays with a poetic, fragmented style; the works of Ocean Vuong or Carmen Maria Machado.

🔑 Key Themes: Queer Identity and Self-Worth, Unrequited and Dysfunctional Love, Emotional Vulnerability and Healing, The Cyclical Nature of Heartbreak, Resilience and Self-Acceptance.
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