Our first title
NobodyTold YouIt WouldFeel LikeThis
Poems & Confessions
By Surya Sabarwal
For anyone who has ever said “I’m fine” and meant something else entirely.
Somewhere there’s a version of you that somebody remembers fondly,
and you will never find out which one it was.
The book
Four parts of one life.
Most of them are yours too.
The one that sits in your chest at 2am when you’re fine, absolutely fine, and then something small breaks you open. You already know this feeling.
Thirty five poems and sixteen prose monologues, from the certainty of sixteen to what remains at twenty eight. First love, the wrong lessons, grief, ambition, and the quiet work of getting back up.
Paperback: October 2026 · Kindle: November 2026
Lines from the book
If one of these finds you, the book will too.
You won’t make the same mistake twice. You will make the opposite one, and call it growth.
Everything you meant and never said is still yours. That’s the problem. It never got to become anyone else’s.
There are places you can never go back to. Not because they don’t exist anymore. Because you don’t.
You can rehearse a conversation four hundred times, and still have nothing ready when they finally say your name.
There are forty three of these in the book. Each one opens a poem or monologue that goes further than it should.
You will spend years getting somewhere,
and about four minutes being there.
Nobody mentions the ratio.
The Preface takes about four minutes to read. Seems fair.
The press
Red Brick House Press
A small, independent press for poetry and prose that says the thing out loud. Books that read like a voice you recognize, and stay with you after the last page.
We are just getting started, which is the most honest thing a press can say. Nobody Told You It Would Feel Like This is our first book.
You already know this feeling.
Now find out you were never the only one.