Moonchild Manifesto by Valerie Parente is a body of work that documents the parallel between two acts: feeling a profound connection and making it your whole mood, and taking a topic and making it your artistic muse. There is a similarity between poetry and the spell we call love. A Moonchild is hyper-sensitive to this similarity and understands how it is equally enchanting as it is taxing.
Divided into three moon phases, this poetry and prose collection follows the subconscious trajectory of The Hurt, The Heal, and The Hope.Valerie Parente’s third poetry and prose collection manifested out of what she does best, mixing psychology, spirituality, and fantasy to make sense of her mental experiences as both a human being with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and a whimsically dark artist.
Love. Heartache. Death.
Rather Be Haunted documents a dark period for the poet. Emotions linger like ghosts. Interpersonal relations cause palpable frustration. Death breaks the heart but in the most beautiful way.Through chronological poetry and prose you can feel all that haunts the obsessive compulsive writer’s psyche as she tries to understand her hyper-sensitivities through rhymes and clever lines. As frustration builds, so does resilience, making the struggles that define our humanity all the more remarkable. After all, isn’t the struggle to make sense of emotions the grandest mark of being alive? What makes us human hurts; that is the gift of the universe.
Rather Be Haunted is the second volume of poetry & prose by Valerie Parente, featuring Mannequin Art alongside writing pieces.
Undergraduate physics student, Jef Sterling, has done enough textbook reading to know that the universe is home to countless mind-blowing discoveries. But Jef never expected one of those discoveries to be the mind of an obsessive compulsive writer sharing the same campus as him. After reading a poem by Lacey Parker about her personal struggle with OCD, Jef’s highly rational brain fixates on uncovering the mysteries held captive in Lacey’s highly irrational brain. Throughout the course of a school year these two students exchange ideas that merge science with art, reality with fantasy, and physical phenomena with mental phenomena. While learning from one another Jef makes it his mission to make sense of Lacey’s nonsensical disorder and all of its incredible ironies; how she lives by the notion of feeling everything emotionally but dreads feeling anything physically, how her mind lives to protect as it gradually wreaks destruction, and most paradoxically how both Lacey’s most rewarding qualities and most detrimental flaws manifest from the same brain. In Touch by Valerie Parente is a realistic fiction novel alive with intellectual discussion, mental strife, heartache, and anecdotal insight into the cognitive confines of obsessive compulsive disorder.
The Artist, The Muse is what you get when you interweave psychology, creativity, and spirituality into the poetic fabric of a mentally disordered daydreamer’s mind. Valerie Parente artfully hones the craft of written word in this collection of poetry and prose through fantastical metaphors, rhythmic patterns, heartfelt emotions, metaphysical references, and breath-taking epiphanies. Dark daydreams and silver-lining mantras blossom out of the obsessive compulsive writer’s verbal landscape as the artist becomes her own muse.
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This website is meant to be a free library for my art, written and visual, in the name of “finding beauty in darkness” and Mental Health Awareness. I have my books listed above for anybody interested in purchasing a physical copy of my work, and for those of you not interested in a book but interested in supporting my website monetarily I’ve enabled this Donation option. Donations are not at all necessary, but they are greatly appreciated. Thank you 🖤
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