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Everything You're Feeling Has a Name: Poems For the Feelings English Forgot to Name, 60 Untranslatable Words from Around the World, and a Poem for Eac
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 28 2026
Pages: 142
Weight: 0.38
Height: 0.33 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Someone asks what's wrong. You say nothing. You are telling the truth - and they hear an excuse.
That is the loneliest part. Not the feeling. The explaining.
You have lain awake at four in the morning with something on your chest that had no cause and no name. You have missed a person you still see every week. You have stood in an ordinary shop, holding an ordinary thing, and been ambushed by somebody who has been gone for years.
And every time, you reached for a word - and your own language handed you nothing.
There was never anything wrong with you. English just left some things out.
Other languages didn't.
toska - a dull ache of the soul; a longing with nothing to long for
hiraeth - homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or one that never existed
saudade - the presence of an absence; love that kept going after the person stopped
sisu - the strength that begins after your strength has run out
ya'aburnee - you bury me - said to someone you would rather not outlive
Sixty words like these, from twenty-six languages. Each one alone on its own page. Each one facing an original poem about what it actually feels like to live inside it.
Not a dictionary. Not a lesson. Sixty moments of being recognised, one after another, until the thing you have been carrying by yourself finally has edges - and a name - and other people in it.
Because a word does something almost nothing else can. It cannot fix anything. It will not bring anyone back. What it does is end the argument about whether the feeling is real.
You are not too much. You are not making it up. You are standing in a room a great many people have stood in - and some of them left something on the wall.
Every word here is real, and in use, and older than any of us.
Read it in one evening. Come back to it for years.
And when someone you love is going through something and you cannot find the words - this is the book you give them. The friend who has stopped answering. The parent you can't reach. The one who keeps saying they're fine.
You will not need all sixty.
You will need four or five.
And you will know exactly which ones.
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