Lines Worth Remembering: A BREW Poetry Award 2024 Collection
- Esperanza Pretila
- Fiction
- Poetry, Literary Fiction
- July 2025
Lines Worth Remembering doesn’t ask to be admired. It asks to be sat with—like a quiet friend who doesn’t fill the silence but makes it bearable. At first glance, it might look like just another anthology, a winner’s circle for poems chosen from a competition. But read a little, and you realize it’s more like a mirror maze, reflecting back parts of yourself you didn’t think belonged in poetry. Ordinary parts. Tender ones. Worn, unspoken things.
There is no swagger in this book. No posturing. The writers, from seasoned voices to first-time teenage poets, are not interested in impressing you. Instead, they are trying to survive something, remember something, or say something they’ve never quite managed to say until now. Some poems arrive like confessionals at the end of a long day. Others feel like messages scribbled on napkins—brief but full of weight. Together, they form a body of work that understands that poetry doesn’t need to shout to matter.
What stands out isn’t the technical brilliance—though it’s there—but the texture. One poem stumbles like a voice cracking under emotion, another walks with the clarity of someone who has made peace with their storm. You find a deep thread of care winding through it all: care for language, yes, but also for memory, for community, for meaning in a world that sometimes feels increasingly artificial. In that sense, the collection isn’t merely artistic. It’s human infrastructure.
Some readers might come expecting high literature. But this book has something more elusive: emotional literacy. The poems know how to hold contradiction—how joy can exist beside sorrow, how rage doesn’t cancel out tenderness, how survival isn’t always triumphant but still sacred. And what’s more, the book doesn’t try to explain that. It just lives in it.
You don’t flip through Lines Worth Remembering searching for the standout line, the next quotable phrase. You read it because it slows you down. Because it feels like the kind of listening we rarely get in daily life. Because even if you don’t remember the exact words later, something in you will remember how they made you feel: a little less alone, a little more awake.
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.