Glass Hearts & Broken Pedestals
Glass Hearts & Broken Pedestals is a deeply personal collection of poetry exploring the many dimensions of love, intimacy, desire, heartbreak, and self-discovery. Written over several years, the collection reflects the author's evolving understanding of herself, romance, sexuality, and relationships as a panromantic, asexual, transgender woman. Through intimate reflections and evocative imagery, Purdy examines what it means to love deeply, to long for connection, and to navigate the sometimes painful distance between the love we want to give and the love others are able to return.
At the heart of the collection is the recognition that love does not always conform to conventional expectations. The poems explore the desire for romance, tenderness, companionship, and physical affection without necessarily seeking sexual fulfillment. In pieces such as “Asexual Desire” and “Where My Love Exists,” Purdy articulates a vision of intimacy that transcends gender boundaries and challenges assumptions about the relationship between romantic love, sexual attraction, and physical closeness. The result is a celebration of the many ways people experience connection and the importance of understanding love on its own terms.
The collection also ventures into the complexities of relationships: the intoxicating excitement of new love, the vulnerability of opening one's heart, the quiet loneliness that can emerge between two people, and the devastation of betrayal, separation, and loss. Poems such as “Not Some Fragile, Broken Thing” explore the tension between accepting support and maintaining personal agency, while “Vacant Hearts” and “It Comes Silently” confront the gradual deterioration of relationships through silence, neglect, and unspoken hurt. Elsewhere, memories of former lovers linger through familiar scents, shared moments, and dreams of futures that never came to pass.
Throughout the book, Purdy returns to images of fragility and beauty, using glass, shattered hearts, fading flowers, and the changing light of dawn to illuminate the delicate nature of human connection. Yet fragility is not synonymous with weakness. Even in moments of profound heartbreak, the poems suggest that healing remains possible and that personal strength can emerge from the very experiences that threaten to break us. Love may leave its marks, but those marks become part of the stories we carry forward.
Glass Hearts & Broken Pedestals is an invitation to reconsider the assumptions we bring to love and relationships. Honest, sensual, vulnerable, and sometimes bittersweet, the collection speaks to queer readers, asexual readers, and anyone who has experienced the joy of being cherished or the pain of loving someone they could not keep. It is a portrait of love in its many forms.
Praise & Reviews
"Though Purdy writes as a panromantic, asexual, transgender woman, the collection’s truths are not confined to identity. “Where My Love Exists” articulates a vision of love “outside of gender boundaries / where bodies are home to beautiful souls.” This is not abstraction; it is an invitation—a call to imagine intimacy divorced from anatomy, liberated from expectations that confine love to biological opposites. In this sense, Glass Hearts participates in a broader queer poetics, but its reach is universal: anyone who has loved and lost, will find themselves here."
— Maya Benton
"Glass Hearts & Broken Pedestals is a collection about the beautiful, messy, and occasionally devastating business of loving another person. What makes this collection particularly interesting is its attention to the differences between romantic and sexual attraction, and its insistence that intimacy does not have to follow the script many of us have been handed. Purdy introduces the collection through her own experience as a panromantic, asexual, transgender woman, explaining that these poems reflect an evolving understanding of identity, love, and relationships. Even so, this collection is also concerned with familiar human questions: How do we ask to be loved? What happens when two people want different things? How do we recover when love ends? And how can we accept another person's support without surrendering our own sense of self?
Although the collection's exploration of asexuality is central to its identity, it would be inaccurate to characterize these poems as exclusively concerned with the absence of sexual desire. Purdy writes about sensuality, erotic attraction, and sexual pleasure as well as romantic companionship. Poems such as “Beneath Your Touch,” “Remembering The Night,” and “Sacrament Of Flesh” explore physical intimacy with varying degrees of explicitness and intensity."
— Angel Williams