Red Threads and Silver Linings: A Woman's Life in Haiku, One Bloody Drop at a Time

Red Threads and Silver Linings is a haiku exploration of the female lifecycle, tracing womanhood through the intimate terrain of the body. Inspired partly by Jaques' "All the world's a stage" speech in As You Like It, Evershed moves through menarche, puberty, menstruation, fertility, conception, miscarriage, pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum life, motherhood, menopause, and aging. Her short-form poetry illuminates the quiet power, vulnerability, and resilience held within the body's cycles.

The collection catalogues the blood that marks each stage of women's biological lives - periods, miscarriages, birthing blood - threading these experiences to seasonal change, the moon's rhythm, and nature's wider cycles. The "red threads" are crimson tides, blossoming flowers, the blood moon: metaphors for menarche's first shock, miscarriage's sadness, labor's endurance, and postpartum's complexity. The "silver linings" gather later pleasures - reblooming azaleas, HRT's sticky petals, a bruised peach scented with second chances. Grief and loss coexist here with endurance, humor, desire, and deepening self-knowledge.

Organized into sections like It's Just a Period She's Going Through, Childbirth and Other Horrors, and An Old Wife's Tale, the book blends the personal with the mythical, the natural world with the biological. Daughters and mothers share pages with ghosts of earlier selves and ancestral echoes. Through haiku's precision, the result is a map of womanhood both grounded and lyrical.

At once meditation and celebration, the collection offers poems that are tender, raw, and unflinchingly honest - honoring the shifting landscape of a woman's life from girlhood's first flush to menopause's soft letting-go, and the humanity found in every bleed, every change, every reckoning of living in a woman's body.

Adele Evershed is the Winner of The Haiku Foundation's 2025 Touchstone Award for Individual Poems

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Advance Acclaim:

Adele Evershed's book Red Threads and Silver Linings is a brave collection of haiku deeply rooted in a woman's experience and yet reaches far beyond it. Who hasn't had a secret or a loss that no one else could know or see; a moment when the body seemed to know something before the mind did? Adele lets us enter these moments through haiku without ever becoming overly sentimental. The girl who hides her first secret in a white towel grows into the woman who origamis into a stork. From mourning what might have been in " a ghost apple/no longer hanging on/in my womb" to learning to live inside an ever-changing body, she eventually sees herself reflected in her daughter, and Adele dedicating this book to her daughter Megan makes it personal and intimate.

These poems are honest. A bathroom incinerator, an ultrasound picture taken off the fridge, a mammogram, a sneeze, a handful of ashes --- in these ordinary moments, love, grief, embarrassment and resilience quietly blend.

Red Threads and Silver Linings reminds us that life is so much more than in the good days. It is also about the days we bleed, wait, lose, heal, begin again and keep going. 

These poems will be appreciated not only by women, but by anyone who has watched someone they love, move through the quiet milestones that are rarely spoken about. 

Vandana Parashar, Editor, Poetry Pea; Associate Editor, haikuKATHA; International Women's Month Editor, #FemkuMag; Author of I Am, Alone, I Am Not; and A Call's Loon

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the Valleys for the American East Coast. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and Touchstone Award winner for an individual poem, she is co-editor of Thin Skin Journal. Her work has appeared in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, The Heron's est, Presence, Prune Juice, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry collection Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press), the short story collection Suffer/Rage (Dark Myth Publications), three novellas-in-flash, and the haiku collections Pressed Between Palms (Nun Prophet Press) and They F#% You Up Your Mam and Dad (Cuttlefish Books). When she's not writing, Adele can be found drinking PG Tips tea and trawling thrift shops for teacups to add to her collection.Winner of The Haiku Foundation's 2025 Touchstone Award for Individual Poems