Some books do not wait for you to read them; they walk up to you, tilt your chin, and insist you look at yourself differently. Mariam Temitope Alayande’s Only If You Look in the Mirror belongs to that rare category. It is a collection that feels more like a room of angled mirrors, each one refracting a different version of the self: broken, burning, blooming, praying.
Rather than tracing heartbreak in a straight line, Alayande turns emotional ruin into a series of shifting landscapes. Heartache becomes weather, topography, myth. In one poem, love devours: “He looked at me like I was edible… yet my fingers didn’t fit into his.” In another, abandonment mutates into fantasy: “He drove her into the ocean of shattered hearts… now she’s a mermaid.” These metamorphoses give the collection a dreamlike logic–pain is never merely pain; it is a portal.
Where another poet might chronicle grief with quiet restraint, Alayande leans into spectacle. Her diction is volcanic, her metaphors hungry for scale. Emotional states erupt as natural disasters, psychic storms, celestial fractures. In this way, she echoes the aesthetic of poets like Ada Limón and Sharon Olds who turn personal trauma, especially around family and the body –into grand, visceral, emotional architecture.
One piece that caught me and had me revisiting was “Throwing Tantrums”
“Bruising myself with your lies,
Bandaging my bruises with your deceit,
You took a fine piece of wood and cut and cut and cut and cut into it.”
Yet the book’s most compelling turn is not its portrayal of heartbreak but the slow, deliberate reclamation that follows. The poems in “Love Thyself,” and “Another Love” do not merely speak empowerment, they perform it. “She is one of a kind,” the poet writes, “one to behold but never to hold.” Such lines reveal a speaker learning to return to herself, to choose her own body, to insist on her own name.
In the closing chapters, the voice sheds its earlier turmoil and steps into a steadier, luminous register…a beautiful spiritual metamorphosis. Divine intimacy replaces romantic exhaustion: Fire, once a symbol of devastation, becomes purification; water becomes blessing; light becomes a home.
If the collection falters anywhere, it is in its persistent emotional crescendo. Every moment arrives loudly, every image burns at full flame. A quieter poem here and there might have deepened the emotional terrain. Still, Only If You Look in the Mirror is a bold, vulnerable debut–one that reminds us that sometimes healing begins not with forgetting but with looking closely, steadily, and without flinching.
