Thought Catalog - Salt Water - book

By Brianna Wiest From Brianna Wiest — internationally bestselling author whose books have sold millions of copies in 40+ languages, featured on TODAY, Forbes, and Oprah Daily. Mama said salt water heals. Sweat. Tears. The sea. The difficult things that help us grow are made of the same stuff as the ocean. This is the book that started from that idea. "Salt Water" is Brianna Wiest's debut poetry collection — published in 2017 before "The Mountain Is You," before "The Pivot Year," before the millions of copies and the 40 languages and the global bestseller lists. This is a book about internalizing your power — about the specific damage of waiting for someone else to give you permission to be happy, to be beautiful, to begin. Early reviewers described it as sitting in a new genre of poetry, somewhere between artistic self-expression and candid self-help — a meditation on acceptance, growth, and what it means to be human. That description still holds. The poems are short, spare, and freeform — built for the k