Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning: poems
(Mercer University Press, 2021)

Winner of the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry

Cawood uses autobiography and imagination in her poems to consider what it means to be young, to fall in and out of love, to break and become whole again, to face tragedy and fear and come out weaker or stronger, to struggle with power, and to let go of those we love not because of lack of feeling but because of earned wisdom. TROUBLE CAN BE SO BEAUTIFUL AT THE BEGINNING tells stories about what it means to uncover truths about oneself, about the people we love, and about the people we come from. —Mercer University Press

“Cawood unpacks with the reader the troubles of home, family, love, and identity…. Intimately realized though vulnerable specificity of the speaker’s spaces, homes, and loved ones, these poems invite the reader to draw parallels between their own experiences and the speaker’s.” —The Hollins Critic

“The poems in Trouble Can Be So Beautiful in the Beginning are more than poems. They are old photos in a family album, handwritten recipes in a tin box. In this beautiful collection, Shuly Xóchitl Cawood examines what it means to be human—the places that hold us, the people we lose. Each poem, its “small, still words a sigh / of ink,” helps us recognize who we are and remember who we used to be. Cawood’s words are “soft as water / stronger than an undertow.” Her poems are time machines, love letters. Maps marked up with stars.” —Melissa Fite Johnson, author of Green

“Shuly Cawood’s collection, Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning, opens with: “The way he leans in and says, I promise, / his copper eyes like pennies / you have plenty of…” and you find yourself leaning in, wanting more. From there you tumble into a rich and vibrant world, one that stretches from Ohio to Mexico, from “the east coast / and west coast of our bed,” from family to friendship to love to loss and back again, from one emotion to another: “rotten then revived, start drowning but burst / above surface for air.” This collection pulls the reader along until the very last poem.” —Courtney LeBlanc, author of Beautiful & Full of Monsters  

“Shuly Xóchitl Cawood's poems shine with love and authenticity.  They take us from the cornfields of Ohio to her ancestral home in Mexico.  The trouble that she finds there IS beautiful--"a flame tilting like curiosity."  She thinks “about what it means to follow someone to the edge of nothing.”  She wonders if she can learn to live with emptiness. Throughout this journey there are promises, doubts, unspoken fears, but there is always an undertow nudging her toward home, toward her abuelitos, and her tia's kitchen where words, food and laughter co-mingle like the swirl of incense and prayer.”  —Cathryn Essinger, author of The Apricot and the Moon