Life As An Island: My Search for Connection

Embark on a powerful poetic journey from hurt to hope with this incredible collection of seventy poems on love, connection, and spirituality.

Diane Grossman Gaston is a clinical social worker by profession, having been an LCSW since 1998. She worked in outpatient mental health for over twenty years, helping patients with persistent psychiatric disorders. This experience has built in her an incredible empathy, which began in her childhood as she learned to express difficult emotions through prose and verse.

Life As An Island: My Search for Connection is a window into her journey of learning, wandering, and healing, a powerful, resonant poetry collection that breathes life into dark spaces and lightens burdensome loads. It is a spiritual successor to Diane's first poetry collection, Life in the Shadows: My Journey Toward Sunlight, which focuses on healing from a fractured family and from grief.

Diane's parents divorced when she was five years old. She often felt left out because her brothers were boys, and they were older than she was, so she spent a great deal of time engaging with television shows and books, and her feelings eventually came out in both narrative and poetry. Her poems became a powerful source of healing, and the written word became a form of therapy for Diane.

As a therapist herself, Diane believes in the importance of experiencing each other as human, using empathy to guide us along our paths. She writes about disconnection, painful emotions that are difficult to move from the head to the heart to the body, feeling unlovable, love that never lasts, angels-both in heaven and on earth-and about her path to peace.

Encouraged by friends that sharing her work is safe-and an encouragement to others-Diane has compiled over seventy new poems from a lifetime of work, written in the pain of isolation, so that others may feel less alone as they relate to her words. Diane hopes that Life As An Island will be a source of connection for many, and that they will be a part of people's journey to guidance, support, and healing.