A mirror for the reader

“In What If We Were Water, Ricky Frost presents a poetic chronicle of trauma and healing, arriving like a necessary tide that will immediately resonate with the broader audience. Born from the lived experience of emotional hardship and refined through the prism of mentorship and vulnerability, this 100-page volume of poems and short prose sketches reads less like a literary artefact but more like a personal reckoning, a courageous confrontation with inherited discomfort.

“Frost, a spoken word artist from Essex, doesn’t posture or decorate. His voice is binding and tactile, often intimate, and always searching. These poems are not built for literary salons or academic deconstruction. They are constructed with the express purpose of survival, communication, and empathy, tools for the wounded and those who care for them. The volume opens with a reflective calm, as if preparing the reader for the emotional plunge that follows. Water, as the title suggests, becomes a recurring metaphor for despair, inheritance, and emotional memory. Frost manipulates this imagery with restriction, letting it emerge organically. He avoids heavy-handed symbolism, choosing instead a raw literalism that allows metaphor to appear almost accidentally, like a thought whispered in a therapist’s office.

“Frost’s strength is his ability to pare down discomfort to its elemental form. The trauma is reported, almost with a distance, and that detachment paradoxically makes it feel more profound. This piece of literary artistry feels like a continuous emotional arc. It documents the evolution from numbness to self-awareness, from shame to self-respect. In that sense, What If We Were Water mirrors the healing journey, confused at first, tentative, then erupting in clarity and peaceful resolution. Frost doesn’t sell the myth of clean recovery, but it is an honest one. Themes of masculinity, mental illness, familial dysfunction, and recovery are treated with care but also a kind of spiritual militancy. Frost is not content merely to describe or confess. He urges people to speak up, to reach out, to unlearn generational silence. There is a didactic streak, certainly, but it is not preachy. This ethical impulse is also embodied in Frost’s life outside of poetry. A mentor with Lads Need Dads, he brings authenticity to his written work by living its message. When he writes about struggling with abandonment or anger, he is not imagining those lives but remembering, listening, and witnessing. The poems thus function as documentation and intervention, literature with a mission not to aestheticize but to alleviate.

“Frost’s writing is direct. There is little in the way of formal experimentation, but there doesn’t need to be. The clarity of the voice is itself a formal gesture. While some poems fall into slightly overfamiliar tropes or phrasing, they rarely feel disingenuous. More often, they emerge from the genre’s spoken word roots, where emotional accessibility is prioritised over novelty of language. Perhaps most affecting are the shorter pieces, poems barely half a page long, in which the silence between lines does as much work as the words themselves. It’s not groundbreaking language. But it is a line that arrests the reader, not because of its cleverness, but because it arrives like a verdict. Frost’s minimalism has the effect of allowing the emotional truth to rise to the surface without interference. The prose interludes between poems add texture to the collection, offering background, context, and moments of gentle introspection. These short stories are not particularly narrative-driven, but rather reflective, small windows into the past, the prison of stigma, or the hidden gestures of survival. They function as rest points in a book otherwise structured by emotional turbulence.

“In today’s literary world, mental health poetry often sits in a strange critical space, celebrated on social media for its accessibility but dismissed by some critics as too personal, too plain, or too confessional. Frost’s work challenges those assumptions. It proves that clarity can be literary. That self-expression, when done with care, can achieve intimacy and resonance. What If We Were Water is not interested in abstraction. It is not afraid of emotion, and in that boldness, it becomes a personal diary and a mirror for the reader. This is not a book for everyone, but it is for anyone who has felt isolated inside their own story, or anyone who has watched a loved one sink under inherited weight. Frost offers a hand, not to pull you to the shore, necessarily, but to let you know you aren’t alone in the current. It’s hard to read this book and not feel moved, not just by the words, but by the author’s commitment to honesty, advocacy, and change. In Frost’s universe, poetry is not just escape but a confrontation, and in that confrontation, he leaves generous, compassionate room for healing.”

Djordje Miladinovic of Thoughts Words Action reviews ‘What if we were water’ by Ricky Frost, available now from Earth Island Books and in all good book stores.

https://thoughtswordsaction.com/2025/07/22/what-if-we-were-water-by-ricky-frost-earth-island-books/