This is not a collection of poems. It is one poem that takes 210 pages to finish.

Built from more than 270 individually titled pieces, read… is a 60,000-word descent through identity, love, trauma, addiction, mental health, grief, art, survival, and the search for meaning.

Each poem can stand on its own, but none of them truly exists alone. Titles become bridges. Images return. Thoughts fracture and reappear. Lyrical prose and braided transitions quietly connect one piece to the next until what first appears to be a poetry collection reveals itself as a single continuous work.

Writer, artist, and documentary photographer Jerry Cordeiro brings the same eye to the page that he has spent more than a decade bringing to the street: drawn to what is uncomfortable, overlooked, damaged, beautiful, and human. His observations move between the intensely personal and the world around him, blurring the boundaries between poetry, memoir, and documentary storytelling.

read… does not move neatly through memory. It circles. Contradicts itself. Breaks apart. Returns. The book asks the reader to experience thought the way it actually happens, rather than the way we tidy it up afterward.

Raw, intimate, darkly observant, and sometimes deliberately disorienting, read… is Jerry Cordeiro’s third self-published book and his most ambitious work yet.

Don’t read it as 270+ poems.

Read it as one.