Librería Samer Atenea
Kálamo Books
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
I Only Wanted to Be Your Flower is a collection of poems and prose about what happens when desire becomes attachment, attachment becomes identity, and love leaves behind something that cannot simply be forgotten.Moving through four sections-Hunger, Devotion, Rupture, and Becoming-Natalie Merrit writes from inside the contradictions of intimacy: tenderness and violence, longing and self-preservation, sexuality and grief, the desire to belong to another person and the need to remain oneself. These are poems about wanting to be chosen, about the risks of being known, and about the ways devotion can blur the boundary between offering oneself and disappearing.Her language is intimate, sensual, and often unsparing. Flowers, mouths, bones, blood, ink, scars, and water recur across the collection, changing meaning as love is imagined, inhabited, lost, and carried forward. The body becomes both refuge and record-a place where pleasure, memory, damage, and desire remain long after circumstances have changed. A tender image can turn dangerous within a line; a declaration of independence can still carry the ache of wanting someone to stay.Writing itself becomes part of this struggle. What cannot be spoken finds its way onto the page, where memory can be revisited and longing given a shape. Across brief fragments and longer, searching passages, Merrit returns to the distance between what we understand and what we continue to want.But this is not simply a collection about heartbreak, nor does it promise the easy resolution of recovery. Merrit is interested in the more difficult territory that follows: how people continue to love what they have lost, how understanding can arrive before acceptance, and how a self is reconstructed from the things it has survived. Becoming leaves room for contradiction-for tenderness that persists alongside anger, for desire that outlives certainty, and for a voice still learning what it can claim as its own.I Only Wanted to Be Your Flower is ultimately a book about attachment, loss, and becoming-and the complicated work of discovering what remains when being loved by someone else can no longer answer the question of who we are.
