Between light and shadow lies a world shaped by memory, myth, and the echoes we try to forget. This collection wanders through gothic landscapes, surreal dreamscapes, and the quiet rooms where grief and transformation meet. The poems move between Wonderland-like whimsy and Nevermore-like darkness, revealing the tension between the worlds we build and the ones we survive.

Within these pages, ravens whisper of loss, mirrors speak in riddles, and the self fractures only to rebuild again. Here, the wounded child, the haunted wanderer, and the shadowed self walk side by side. Each poem becomes a doorway-into trauma, into healing, into the strange places where identity dissolves and reforms.

Themes of death, rebirth, spiritual darkness, inner alchemy, and emotional reckoning thread through the work. Pain becomes ritual, grief becomes architecture, and the act of writing becomes a reclamation of the self. This book is for those who have lived between worlds: between hope and despair, between dream and waking, between the person they were and the one they're becoming.

Poignant, unsettling, and fiercely honest, this collection invites readers to step into the in-between-to sit with their shadows, to gather their ghosts, and to discover the quiet power that grows in the dark.

Michael Hansen is a poet whose work explores survival, self-acceptance, and the beauty hidden within madness. Born in Colorado and shaped by adversity from an early age, he has transformed hardship into powerful storytelling, weaving personal experience into every line he writes. Now residing in Iowa, Michael crafts poetry that speaks to the lost, the dreamers, and the resilient. His debut collection, The Hatter's Crown: A Journey Through Wonderland and Shadow, is a testament to the healing found in confronting pain, embracing one's fractured parts, and daring to create meaning from chaos.