TW: This article discusses sensitive issues such as sexual abuse and domestic violence.
In her poetry collection, I Would Leave Me If I Could, singer-songwriter Halsey proves she is a writer first and foremost.
Halsey, better known as Ashley Frangipane, is a twenty-six-year-old author from New Jersey. She currently resides in California, where she enjoys gardening, painting, baking intricate cakes, and taking walks with her dog, Jagger. Ashley has fifty-three tattoos and is a hobbyist musician in her spare time.
This ‘about the author’ description in the Target edition of I Would Leave Me If I Could serves to perfectly encapsulate Halsey’s style – that she is multifaceted, with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour, and that, before all else, she is a writer.
This collection of poetry is striking in its honesty, moving in its vulnerability, and unmistakably alive. In an Instagram caption, Halsey explained that – unlike the glamorous production surrounding her music – this work is a “faceless”, more intimate depiction of her experiences. In I Would Leave Me If I Could, Halsey deep-dives through her most personal stories as though she is sitting beside you to relay them herself. Ruminating on her life since childhood, Halsey deals with abuse, fame, love, and heartbreak with unflinching candor. It is this quality, coupled with her innate skills with language, that makes her status as a New York Times Bestselling Author no huge surprise.
Love and violence
A significant recurrence throughout Halsey’s poetry is her talk of relationships, both the good and the chaotic. The latter is exemplified by Lighthouse, which depicts a lover struggling with addiction and their violent anger. Halsey’s fear and resentment are clearly expressed, but so is her enduring instinct to help and nurture him, like ‘cradling a newborn’. This poem is overtly reminiscent of her song Without Me, which – accompanied by the music video – portrays a relationship in which Halsey endeavours to ‘fix’ her partner, only for him to then take advantage.
Halsey also alludes to domestic violence in Stockholm Syndrome Pt.1, using the metaphor of ‘tender spiderwebs. / All violet, / yellow, / blue’ to describe a black eye inflicted by her partner. These lines went on to become lyrics in Clementine and suggest that it has taken Halsey a long time to heal from the turbulence of her past relationships.
However, not all the relationships reflected upon were so toxic. Forever… Is A Long Time details a relationship that actually helped Halsey in her healing, with someone who ‘spent a long time, / tending to a home that’s burning in flames’. By the time this poem became a song on her album Manic the relationship had ended and so it took on a more melancholic, minor tone. The experience still appears to hold value for Halsey though given the original poems’ inclusion in this book.
Sexual assault
Like domestic violence, sexual violence is a topic that Halsey refuses to shy away from. The subject is first approached in Eight, where we’re told about the overly friendly mailman from her youth who mysteriously left his job. Similarly, The Painter tells of a traumatic event that left ‘an empty cartridge in [Halsey’s] memory’. Both poems are deeply affecting in their depiction of childhood innocence and naivety as well as of confusion and hurt.
In January 2018, Halsey delivered her poem A Story Like Mine, featured in this book, to New York City Women’s March. I highly recommend watching the video online: her strength as an orator makes her words even more powerful and even more stirring. Her concluding message that we should each ‘Be a voice / for all those / who have prisoner tongues’ highlights the activist within Halsey, as well as the progressive response that poetry is able to inspire.
Parallels to music
“the poetry collection bears the rhythm and feel of spoken word”
In past interviews, Halsey has explained that before writing an album she goes through a process of ‘collecting’: amassing ideas and words in the form of poetry. Within this book there are several connections to her discography, with lines that later became lyrics in I’m Not Mad, 3am, The Prologue, Wipe Your Tears, Devil In Me, Clementine, Forever… Is A Long Time, and Alanis’ Interlude. These appear like little Easter eggs when reading, with their wider poems offering a new perspective on the songs’ origins.
Although I Would Leave Me If I Could still feels removed from Halsey’s music, the poetry collection bears the rhythm and feel of the spoken word; it appears more instinctive, its honesty more brutal than in her songs. It’s as though we are reading her diary set to rhyming couplets. I recommend this book to anyone seeking to know Halsey better as a writer and artist, or to anyone simply wishing to read good poetry.
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, please see Citizens Advice for a list of support organisations and guidance.
Caitlin Chatterton
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