If I Know Anything About a Knife (Downloadable PDF)
Mental illness is like hollow bones. It makes you fragile, yet gives you the ability to fly. In this raw, honest book, the truth of instability shows how a young woman survives the death of her father, unstable lovers, tranquility in nature that allows her to arc towards health, peace, and even true love. There’s no turning away from this collection without being changed and challenged. Carley Mayson’s debut collection glints with both danger and life.
Note: This book contains references to self-harm, suicidal ideation, and related themes.
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$9.95 CAD
Additional information
| Page Count | 72 |
|---|---|
| Year Published | 2025 |
Carley Mayson
Carley Mayson is a mentally ill writer who was born in Calgary, Alberta and attended Mount Royal University where she earned her BA in English. She then attended the University of Gloucestershire where she received her MA in Creative and Technical Writing. She loves her dog and her boyfriend.
With precision, intensity, and insight, Carley Mayson explores the vital entangling of harm and healing, loss and retrieval, isolation and community. Equally attuned to the howl and the song, If I Know Anything About a Knife is a compelling, must-read debut—a collection I will return to for its distinctive, honest poems that challenge and reward, that devastate and uplift.
~ Daniel Scott Tysdal, author of
The End Is in the Middle: Mad Fold-In Poems
Carley Mayson’s If I Know Anything About a Knife explores the liminality of addiction recovery with sharp tenderness. While entrenched in a landscape of pain, Mayson simultaneously showcases the small acts of care that have expansive effects—clean sheets on a bed, freshly baked cookies, FaceTime friend dates, grandma’s ring on her finger. If I Know Anything About a Knife simmers with courage where Mayson’s incisive lines and unflinching details of her recovery journey reveal the gift of communal care: “to feel all this pain and to have one person who wants to read it.”
~ Tea Gerbeza, author of How I Bend Into More