Unladylike

Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love is a lyrical and unflinching exploration of identity, survival, and self-return. Blending memoir, poetry, and myth, Regina Louise invites readers into an intimate landscape where the personal becomes archetypal and the body holds memory, truth, and transformation.

Through a series of evocative and emotionally precise pieces, the collection traces the subtle and overt ways women are conditioned to abandon themselves in pursuit of love, belonging, and safety. What emerges is not only a reckoning with that inheritance, but a courageous reimagining of what it means to come home to oneself.

Rooted in lived experience yet expansive in its reach, Unladylike moves between tenderness and ferocity, grief and reclamation. Louise writes from the thresholds—where silence breaks, where longing reveals its cost, and where a new language of self-worth begins to take form. Her voice is both deeply personal and universally resonant, offering readers a mirror for their own unspoken truths.

This collection is not only a body of work—it is a map, a praxis. A cartography of becoming that honors the complexity of healing while refusing the narratives that diminish it. With clarity, compassion, and power, Unladylike asks what it means to choose oneself fully, and what becomes possible when we do.

For readers of contemporary poetry, memoir, and transformational writing, this book offers both witness and invitation: to remember, to reclaim, and to re-author the story of love.