Behind the Mask: A Poetry Collection by Ashlyn Gallant

Description

Some masks protect us. Others become so familiar that we forget we are wearing them.

In Behind the Mask, South African poet, lyricist and storyteller Ashlyn Gallant writes into the spaces between who we appear to be and who we are when no one is watching.

This powerful debut poetry collection moves through childhood wounds, abandonment, destructive love, grief, infertility, loneliness, identity, emotional survival and faith. It gives voice to the woman who learned to become smaller to keep the peace, the heart that mistook longing for home, and the survivor slowly discovering that healing does not require pretending the hurt never happened.

Across poems such as The Wound Beneath My Will, Hello Lover, Goodbye Me, The Stepford Wife, Where Light Still Lives, I Chose the Mirror Over the Door, Behind the Mask, Abba Father and Still, I Wait, Gallant examines what remains after the performance ends.

There are no convenient answers here.

Grief is allowed to grieve. Faith is allowed to question. Love is examined alongside control, longing alongside loneliness, and survival alongside the cost of surviving.

Yet Behind the Mask is not simply a collection about pain.

It is about reclamation.

It is about learning to raise the voice you were taught to lower. About recognising that endurance is not the same as love. About discovering light inside the places others left hollow. About looking into the mirror and finding, beneath every borrowed version of yourself, someone still worthy of being seen.

Gallant’s poetry is intimate, accessible and emotionally direct, accompanied throughout by delicate monochrome illustrations that deepen the atmosphere of the collection without overwhelming the words.

For readers who have ever carried grief quietly, hidden behind a carefully practised smile, wrestled with unanswered prayer or had to rebuild a sense of self after loss, Behind the Mask offers something more valuable than easy reassurance: recognition.

A book for the broken-hearted, the unheard, the masked and the rising.

Reader Note

This collection contains themes of grief, loss, family wounds, harmful relationships, emotional pain, infertility and faith during seasons of unanswered prayer.