Clangs of metal and cries of war subside as a calm illness travels through the iron-scented crowd. There is no more flesh, only stone.

From the sea of statues emerges the deity with her shield. Aegis is a beautifully written and illustrated poetry and prose collection, written to heal the soul.

This collection contains four sections: sorrow, warfare, detachment, and transcendence, crafted upon the fluctuations of human emotion. Love, mental health, illness, death, depression, anxiety, joy, trauma, personal growth, and other aspects of the human condition are uncovered in this collection.

The aegis, or Athena's shield, becomes a metaphor for our own individual aegises. They are the intangible barrier between self and world, protecting us as we oscillate between emotional states.

Allow yourself to delve into the worlds of sorrow and resentment, vengeance and peace, hatred and emptiness; grant yourself the shameless ability to become acquainted with the feelings you prejudice. Drawing inspiration from romantic and gothic poetry, here is a contemporary expression of the human condition.

Kimberly Burlamaqui's poetic outlook on human life is inspired by the works of Dante Alighieri, Edgar Allen Poe, Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Alexander Pushkin. This work explores greek mythological themes and interweaves elements ofgothic and contemporary literature.

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