Synopsis:
Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love by Regina Louise is a powerful poetry collection that explores self-love, healing, identity, and emotional truth through a mythopoetic lens. Blending memoir, poetic storytelling, and spiritual insight, this debut collection invites readers into a deeply personal and universal journey of reclaiming the self after trauma, heartbreak, and abandonment.
At its core, Unladylike is a book about love—not the kind conditioned by approval, performance, or survival—but love as reclamation, authorship, and embodied truth. Through lyrical, unflinching poems, Regina Louise examines the ways women and survivors are taught to contort themselves to be chosen, and what it means to return to oneself instead. These poems move through themes of inner child healing, emotional resilience, codependency, desire, grief, and personal sovereignty, offering readers both reflection and recognition.
Structured as a poetic cartography of becoming, this collection traces the evolution from silence to voice, from self-abandonment to self-devotion. Each piece acts as an excavation site where memory, the body, and identity intersect—revealing how lived experience can be transformed into meaning, agency, and self-trust. With recurring imagery of lace, mirrors, altars, and the body as archive, Unladylike creates a symbolic landscape that is both intimate and expansive.
Perfect for readers of contemporary poetry, women’s empowerment, and trauma-informed healing, Unladylike speaks to those navigating personal growth, recovering from toxic relationships, or seeking deeper self-understanding. Fans of authors like Rupi Kaur, Yrsa Daley-Ward, and Ocean Vuong will find resonance here, while discovering a voice that is wholly original and unapologetically its own.
This is more than a poetry book—it is a reclamation. A remembering. A return to the self as home.
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Unladylike is a deeply intimate and beautifully written collection of poetry and prose. Reading it, I felt like Regina Louise was opening up her heart and baring her soul, placing herself in such a vulnerable position to share these stories on the page. Through the emotion behind every poem, you can feel that she’s sharing her own struggle and healing journey so that others who have walked similar roads can find healing, or simply companionship, in her words.
What I love about poetry is that it doesn’t tell a clean story the way a novel does. It paints an abstract picture, and like song lyrics, it hits differently for every person who reads it, touching different parts of each reader’s life. So even if you haven’t lived through the exact experiences she so eloquently and painfully describes, you can still relate. You can bring the moments that have taken you to your own dark or devastating places, and you’ll recognize the feelings rising off the page. That’s an extra layer of beauty poetry offers that a carefully plotted novel doesn’t always give us.
Her voice is what stayed with me most. There’s a clear blend of trauma, inner wounds, and having been a victim in different seasons of life, and yet a powerful feminine fierceness shines through all of it. Even in the midst of being broken down, she writes with determination, with a sense that she matters and her story matters. It’s so refreshing to see those qualities survive everything she lays out on these pages. It’s almost like we’re given glimpses of hope and healing all throughout the collection, because we can see the strength in her words.
I received a complimentary copy of this book from Poetic Book Tours.
All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Regina Louise is a sought-after speaker, teacher, coach, and author. Recently she was the recipient of the prestigious Christopher Award, given to producers for stories that “affirm the human spirit.” In 2019 she received the Jordan Award for service in transforming foster care through advocacy and the arts; the Community Service Award for Children and Families from the Seneca Foundation; and the NAIMC Vision Award for original programming that “reflects the lives, spirit, and contributions of people of color and represents the ethnic and cultural diversity of the viewing audience.” She is the author of the bestselling memoirs Somebody’s Someone and Someone Has Led This Child to Believe. A Lifetime movie, I Am Somebody’s Child: The Regina Louise Story, is based on her life and was nominated for a 2020 NAACP Award for Best Director.
In 2011, wanting to honor a pledge she made to herself as a young foster child and to support her son who was struggling in college, Regina returned to college. She graduated summa cum laude from the California Institute of Integral Studies and then went on to the University of California, Riverside, to earn an MFA in creative writing and writing for the performing arts.
Regina’s work in the theater was nominated for two NAACP Theater Awards. Currently a Hoffman Process teacher, she also leads workshops and has speaking engagements around the country. She is often featured in magazines and on news out- lets, including Good Morning America, PBS, BBC, NBC, CNN, NPR, HLN, and many others.
@therealreginalouise
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