This book didn’t begin as a book. It began in fragments—lines scribbled in the margins of journals, phrases typed in phone notes in the middle of the night, thoughts I didn’t know what to do with yet. For a long time, Beautifully Confusing was just a quiet space I created for myself. A place to process what I couldn’t say out loud, to turn emotions I didn’t fully understand into something I could hold.
I’ve always loved reading poetry. Even as a child, it felt like home—a form that made space for stillness, contradiction, and feeling deeply without explanation. But writing it was different. Writing meant being honest. Writing meant vulnerability. And as someone who’s always chased perfection, that was hard. For much of my life, I thought strength meant staying composed. Poetry broke that open for me. It gave me permission to be raw, uncertain, and unpolished—and to still call that art.
Over time, these entries became more than just personal reflections. Some poems came from my own life—real conversations, real heartbreaks, real moments of self-questioning. Others were imagined, overheard, or fictionalized. But all of them, in some way, speak to truth. Emotional truth. The kind that doesn’t need a linear story to feel real.
What surprised me most was how freeing it felt to shape those feelings into form. When something heavy becomes a poem, it somehow loses weight. Not because it disappears, but because it transforms. It becomes something crafted, something others might resonate with, carry with them, or see themselves reflected in.
Publishing Beautifully Confusing has been one of the most uncomfortable and vulnerable things I’ve ever done and also the most freeing. I’m not someone who’s naturally an open book (no pun intended), but this collection asked me to become one. To let go of the need to have it all figured out, and instead just tell the truth of what I felt in the moment I wrote it.
Now, what once lived in private journals lives in this book. And I hope that in some small way, these pages become a mirror or a companion for you too. A space to sit with your own questions, transitions, and contradictions. A reminder that even when life doesn’t make sense, it can still be beautifully confusing.
Beautifully Confusing is the debut poetry collection from first-time author Yael Frai—a lyrical, clear-eyed meditation on what it means to come of age in a world that rarely gives us answers. Told in three parts—Becoming, Breaking, and Building—these poems chart the vulnerable, often chaotic process of self-invention: the moments we question everything, the seasons we fall apart, and the quiet strength it takes to rebuild.
With language that moves between restraint and rawness, Frai writes with the clarity of someone learning to be honest on the page, even when the story isn’t linear. Some poems are autobiographical. Others are fictionalized, overheard, or imagined. But all reflect emotional truth through the lens of someone deeply attuned to transformation.
These poems sit at the intersection of vulnerability and ambition, of softness and self-definition. For anyone navigating transitions, Beautifully Confusing offers companionship in the in-between: when you’re letting go, beginning again, or simply learning to be.
To read poetry is to make peace with contradiction.
To live is to remember: even confusion can be beautiful.
Available now on Amazon.
my debut reading for the book launch :)
@eaashamusic gracing us with a performance!
