A life can contain hospital corridors, childhood memories, exhausting shifts, complicated relationships, sleepless nights, and moments of unexpected peace. In The Maps We Make: A Poetry Collection, Cherie L. Davis transforms those experiences into a seven-part poetic journey shaped by what she has lived, endured, questioned, and learned.
The collection draws its energy from real days rather than distant observation. Its poems move through personal trauma, healthcare, love, surrender, healing, mental health, and concerns about the wider world, creating an intimate record of a life examined from several directions.
Seven Movements Across an Emotional Landscape
The opening territory of The Maps We Make is frighteningly immediate. Cherie finds herself confronting her husband’s failing heart, surrounded by tests, waiting, uncertainty, and the possibility that the person who has provided stability in her life could suddenly be gone.
That crisis becomes one point on a much larger emotional map.
The collection reaches into childhood, where Cherie confronts memories of sexual abuse by her older brother and the silence that followed within the family. These experiences aren’t treated as isolated chapters safely contained in the past. Their effects travel forward, influencing the adult mind and appearing through anxiety, depression, flashbacks, and difficult nights.
The book’s structure suits this emotional reality. Life doesn’t always reveal its meaning chronologically, and memory rarely asks permission before resurfacing. The collection allows experiences to appear with that same unpredictable quality.
Each poem can therefore exist independently. Read together, they begin forming something larger: a portrait of one woman continually locating herself amid experiences that have changed how she understands safety, trust, identity, and survival.
From Caring for Others to Releasing Control
Cherie’s professional life introduces another powerful dimension. With fifteen years of healthcare experience, she understands nursing from inside the long shifts, staffing pressures, patient encounters, emotional exhaustion, and everyday responsibility of caring for people during vulnerable moments.
Within the poetry, nursing becomes deeply human. There are patients who leave lasting impressions and systems that can frustrate the people working inside them. There is also the repeated act of returning to work and offering care while carrying personal struggles beyond the hospital walls.
The collection then enters an intensely private area through Cherie’s exploration of consensual Dominant/submissive dynamics. For someone accustomed to responsibility and control, choosing to kneel and surrender within a trusted relationship offers a rare form of mental stillness.
One poem, “Threads of Strength,” gives this theme particular emotional depth. It portrays a powerful man whose strength exists alongside scars, generosity, laughter, and vulnerability. The relationship develops through mutual trust and an evolving willingness to support one another.
The poem also captures how roles within relationships can shift. Someone who once provided strength may eventually need to receive it. Cherie’s writing recognizes vulnerability as part of intimacy and shows how trust can create space for emotional restoration.
Healing While Keeping Her Eyes Open
As the collection progresses, healing becomes increasingly prominent. Therapy and EMDR appear alongside psilocybin and writing itself. Boundaries, self-love, and the conscious pursuit of joy become practices developed over time.
Recovery remains uneven throughout these poems. Old memories still have power. Anxiety may arrive at three in the morning, grief can resist explanation, and the mind can continue racing long after the immediate danger has passed.
Cherie gives these recurring shadows room on the page. She also records the work of staying present through them. Healing becomes something practiced repeatedly through awareness, support, personal choices, and the willingness to keep engaging with life.
Her attention eventually moves beyond individual experience. The collection considers mass shootings, increasing dependence on screens, fading face-to-face connection, and the ways society continues to struggle with violence and isolation.
This wider perspective gives the final portion of the book a different scale. The woman examining her own history is also looking carefully at the culture surrounding her. The same willingness to face uncomfortable personal truths extends toward difficult questions about contemporary life.
About the Author
Cherie L. Davis is an author and nurse leader whose writing explores resilience, identity, healing, leadership, and human complexity.
Her memoir, Through the Fire: A Journey of Trauma, Healing, and Self-Discovery, explores survival and reclaiming oneself after trauma. Ninety Seconds: What Nursing Taught Me Between Breakdowns and Bad Shifts draws upon fifteen years in healthcare, combining compassion, humor, professional experience, and lessons gathered behind the scrubs.
In The Maps We Make, Cherie uses poetry to examine experiences that include love, grief, anxiety, childhood wounds, nursing, intimacy, resilience, and recovery.
Coordinates of a Life Still Unfolding
The Maps We Make understands that people are continually shaped by where they’ve been. Some places leave wounds. Others offer safety, connection, understanding, or a reason to continue.
Through seven movements and poems capable of standing independently, Cherie creates a personal record of those coordinates. The collection follows a life through darkness, service, vulnerability, healing, and awareness, preserving the complicated paths through which a person keeps becoming herself.
