Lines Worth Remembering: A BREW Poetry Award 2024 Collection
- Esperanza Pretila
- Fiction
- Poetry, Literary Fiction
- July 7, 2025
Poetry anthologies often walk a tightrope between the polished and the performative, but Lines Worth Remembering skips the circus entirely. Instead, it sets up something closer to a town square: quiet in some corners, blazing with speech in others, but undeniably alive. This book, edited by Esperanza Pretila and drawn from the BREW Poetry Award 2024, doesn’t promise you neat answers or grand conclusions—it simply opens the door and lets the poets speak. And speak they do, across pages that hum with weathered truths and new awakenings.
What’s striking isn’t just the range of voices, though that’s certainly there—from teens still finding their names to seasoned poets who write like they’ve lived five lifetimes. It’s the way the collection makes space for contradiction without trying to resolve it. A poem about a frog on a trampoline follows one about cysts and despair. There’s no hierarchy of suffering here, and no forced optimism either. Just poems arranged like people at a long communal table, each one offering something: a memory, a plea, a joke, a quiet moment of clarity.
There is something tactile about the poems in this collection. Many aren’t sculpted for effect but are built from everyday materials: frustration with traffic, love misunderstood, loneliness that has learned to dress itself in humor. The best of them do not declare their brilliance; they ask you to stop, reread, maybe read aloud. And isn’t that what poems should do? Linger like the scent of a meal long after the table’s been cleared?
What the book doesn’t do—thankfully—is pretend poetry must always be grandiose. There are no footnotes here, no ivory-tower language. Instead, it relies on the oldest poetic device of all: sincerity. Not to be confused with simplicity. The emotional complexity in a poem like “6ft Deep” or “The Voice” unfolds only if you let it. You have to sit with the discomfort. You have to accept that there might not be closure. And yet the act of reading them becomes its own form of connection.
What surprised me most was how much of the collection is driven not by suffering, but by the effort to make sense of living with it. That distinction matters. These aren’t poems about despair so much as they are poems written from within it, by people who still get up in the morning, still write, still wonder. You feel the pulse of people trying. Sometimes failing. But always trying.
It’s easy to dismiss anthologies as collections of “best” work, where the term “best” is often defined by gatekeepers and trends. Lines Worth Remembering avoids that trap. It feels like a curated conversation rather than a competition. And the result is a book that doesn’t just celebrate poetry—it trusts it.
If you’re looking for polished, performative, and perfect, look elsewhere. But if you want poetry that breathes, that contradicts itself, that dares to be ordinary and sacred at the same time, this book will find you. And some lines really will stay.
Esperanza Pretila, MBA, BSNS, CHR, CFS, is an editor, writer, and founder of award-winning socio-entrepreneurial platforms. Her love for the written word began early—scribbling in her aunts’ college books at age three—and has guided her journey ever since. From winning a poetry award in fifth grade, to serving as the English Literary Editor of her high school publication The OLCAn, to working in the town library while studying at the University of the Philippines, she has pursued language with enduring passion.
