Our Life Before Mars

By Renee de la Roche-Zhu

Our Life Before Mars is a poetic meditation on the intimate bond between place and self - how cities shape us, and how we carry them long after we leave. Written across six years and six cities - New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Boston, and other transient spaces - these poems explore the emotional and philosophical weight of geography where place becomes both setting and character.

Tracing themes of grief and inheritance, ambition and identity, love and loss, this collection moves fluidly through time and memory - asking: What does it mean to live meaningfully? To choose stillness over escape? To grow older without growing apathetic? To wrestle with freedom, home, and the self perpetually in flux?

These poems offer glimpses into that search - e.g.,
On vulnerability:
Except what I really want to say is I am afraid / That the big-eared boy on the 2nd floor will not make friends that last / A lifetime. That the French florist on the corner will no longer carry / Birds of paradise. That the wildfires of California / Will rage again this fall / That tomorrow you'd die on the way / To the grocery store
- Act of Survival

On grief:
Standing at your eulogy, with terrors in my stomach I'm / Unable to name, I thought about those who buy groceries / On Friday nights. Those making tea in the quiet morning / Light of their kitchen. Those who you'd laugh at, who guard / Their lives with a vortex at the core. Those not unlike me
- Atonement

On loss:
I, too, battled with the fear of happiness, the age we learned to be bystanders / To the advent of the morning - how it wears the war on its / Shirt sleeves. How it eats glass for breakfast.
- Three Lives

On self-authorship:
I looked at the flood / In this world, standing in the way of the good life. And I / Thought about how I want to rule over / My flood. My chaos. I took the flowers from her hand, and told her, / I want to be the King
- Our Metamodernity

On aging:
Directions perplex me, so I keep pacing / Until I reach the crest of my clavicle bones. Until I am near / The opening and closing of my heart. I knock on it - like / Onlookers near a church. For I know, this, too / Is the war
- Thirties

On love:
You'll eat a hamburger, in fact, which you hate. You'll keep / On eating it, like how you'll keep on loving / Me. And I'll tell you it's ok if I don't / Get free, this time - and talk to / Your mother
- You'll Eat a Hamburger, In Fact

At once intimate and expansive, Our Life Before Mars is a map of a modern woman's emotional terrain - where the ordinary and the epic unfold quietly side by side. It is a reflection on becoming, just before the next great transformation.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0F7F9LGVL
• ISBN13: 9798218667528
• Release Date: May 2025
• Publisher: Liminal Press
• Length: 132 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.3" x 8.0"