About this project

I've been working with South African poet Yoshira Marbel to publish a collection of her work, Unspecified, an intimate, honest, painful, and hauntingly lyrical documentation of her daily struggles with an emotional landscape beyond her control, and while it would be easy to simply publish it electronically, we'd both like to get her words in print. The goal of this fundraiser is to pay all the costs of creating a quality print edition of Unspecified, from setup and proof copies to printing and shipping - including shipping copies from Phoenix to South Africa. A pledge of $25 gets you a copy of the eBook & print editions - a pledge of $250 or more could get you the original artwork used to create the book's cover, too. (Even $1 is enough to earn our thanks; see all the reward details on the right.)

Notes from the Author, Yoshira Marbel:

I started this collection during a very difficult time in my life. The guy I loved dearly had lied to me, I was experiencing extremely terrible side effects from all the medication I was taking including seizures and restless leg syndrome, my very conservative family had their own opinions on my condition which they voiced regularly, and death seemed the only escape. Poetry became a constructive way for me to express my emotions honestly and to cope with all these feelings of emptiness and loneliness I had built up inside me over all these years.

As an Indian in South Africa, I come from a very religious, traditional family. And my relationship with my family is an important aspect of my life.  With depression my outlook on life, my patterns of thinking all began to change and this was not acceptable. So the struggles to be true to myself and satisfy them have been long and seemingly never ending. 

Of course I have many reasons I want this book to be in print, personally. Print is the only medium that people here in South Africa consider to be any type of achievement. After all these years of hardship this book provides a sense of accomplishment for me, especially since a child I have always been judged and have had my self confidence torn apart by people who have apparently “loved me”.

Secondly to be published would allow people who don’t have access to the internet here in South Africa to read about my experiences with depression, and realize that they are not alone. To realize that their feelings of sadness can be expressed and do not have to be hidden away fearing people’s ignorant opinions and judgements.  

I hope you will pledge towards my project, to create awareness of this disease and help an average girl from South Africa make her wildest dream a reality.

-Yoshira Marbel

Notes from the Publisher, Teel McClanahan III:

I've got experience putting books together, having published 15 books of my own work (poetry, novels, and more) in the last few years, and I've already got 99% of the work done getting the book ready to send to the printer. I've also been creating eBooks from my work for years, and whether or not we reach our funding goal for the print edition, we'll be publishing Unspecified as an eBook for sure - and I've already done 99% of the work of formatting it for release across all the major eBook formats. I've also designed the cover, both for the eBook and the print editions, beginning with my painting 'embers of you in a sea of me':

This 12"x24" acrylic on canvas painting is a one-of-a-kind work of art and is one of the rewards available for backing the project because it was used to create the cover of Unspecified, which you can see here:

I feel this image is a good fit for Yoshira's poetry because while it's pretty dark overall, it's full of flashes of brilliance and passion and turbulence. In addition, I've added a second painting, 'without you', to the available rewards, because it matches closely with one of the recurring motifs of Unspecified, something which I'm sure is emotionally familiar to most anyone who has experienced depression themselves:

Also one-of-a-kind, 'without you' is 18"x24" and is technically mixed media because in addition to acrylic on canvas, I used real razor blades which actually cut right into the canvas in order to express what I was going through when I created it. Several of Yoshira's poems in Unspecified represent her own efforts to address a parallel despair, and we thought it would make an appropriate high-end reward.

Book Description

Young South African poet Yoshira Marbel experiences such a complex and profound state of emotional turmoil in her everyday life that it leaves even the most experienced doctors at a loss for words; their official diagnosis for her was 'Unspecified'. Yoshira has invested years of her life in the painful struggle to do what her doctors could not; both in finding a path through the troubles of her life and in expressing her depression, heartbreak, emptiness, anger, and suffering through poetry. 'Unspecified' is her first published collection, exploring themes which are familiar to most of us, to one degree or another, but amplified through the lens of Yoshira's honesty, intensity, and natural lyricism.

Selected poems from Unspecified