In ‘The Maps We Make’, Cherie L. Davis Shows How We Keep Locating Ourselves After Life Changes Us 

Life rarely unfolds in a clean sequence. A hospital room can awaken old fears, a demanding career can become a place of refuge, and healing can uncover memories that seemed safely buried. Cherie L. Davis captures that complicated movement in The Maps We Make: A Poetry Collection, a deeply personal work structured across seven emotional movements.

Through poetry, the collection travels through marriage, childhood trauma, nursing, intimacy, mental health, recovery, and social observation. The poems come from real experiences, giving the book an immediacy that makes its emotional landscape feel intensely lived.

Poetry Drawn From Real Days

At the heart of The Maps We Make is the understanding that significant experiences leave traces. The collection opens around one of the most frightening periods in Cherie’s life: her husband’s failing heart.

Hospital tests, uncertainty, waiting, and the possibility of loss create an atmosphere where everything familiar suddenly feels fragile. From this crisis, the collection reaches backward toward childhood experiences that shaped her long before she had language for their impact.

Cherie addresses sexual abuse by her older brother and the family silence that followed. These poems engage with what happens when a child carries something overwhelming into adulthood. The memories remain present through anxiety, flashbacks, depression, and moments when the mind refuses to become quiet.

The poems aren’t arranged to make life appear orderly. Their movement reflects the unpredictable nature of memory itself. A present-day fear can open a door to something decades old. An ordinary moment can carry emotional weight from another time.

That quality makes the collection’s title especially fitting. These are coordinates from a life still being understood, drawn through experiences that changed its direction.

What Strength Looks Like Behind the Scrubs

Another substantial part of the collection comes from Cherie’s years in healthcare. Nursing places her beside people during some of their most vulnerable moments while exposing her to short staffing, exhausting shifts, institutional problems, grief, and enormous responsibility.

Her poems explore what it means to care for others while managing one’s own internal struggles. The scrubs become associated with service, professional identity, endurance, and the emotional protection needed to return for another shift.

A different exploration of strength emerges through consensual Dominant/submissive dynamics. Cherie writes about the deliberate choice to surrender control to someone trusted and the mental quiet she experiences through that release.

“Threads of Strength,” one of the poems from the collection, approaches this relationship through images of power, vulnerability, trust, gratitude, and shared healing. The man at its center possesses an intense presence, yet vulnerability also becomes part of their connection. The relationship develops into a space where emotional burdens can be held and healing can take place.

Within the larger collection, surrender becomes another point on the map. It shows how trust and vulnerability can influence the way someone understands personal strength.

Healing, Memory, and the World Outside

Recovery occupies much of the book’s later emotional territory. Cherie writes about therapy, EMDR, psilocybin, self-love, boundaries, and the gradual practice of remaining present with herself.

Progress doesn’t erase difficult days. Anxiety can still arrive during the early morning hours. Flashbacks can return, depression can settle in, and grief can resist easy explanation. The poetry acknowledges these experiences while documenting the continuing decision to pursue healing and joy.

Eventually, The Maps We Make looks outward. Mass shootings, diminished human connection, screens, and weakening social bonds enter the collection. These observations extend its concerns beyond individual survival toward the world in which that survival occurs.

The result is a book with an unusually broad emotional range. Private memories sit beside professional experiences, intimate relationships, psychological recovery, and concerns about society. Each poem remains its own piece while contributing another location to the larger map.

About the Author

Cherie L. Davis is an author and nurse leader whose work explores resilience, identity, leadership, healing, and the complicated realities people carry beneath the surface.

Her memoir, Through the Fire: A Journey of Trauma, Healing, and Self-Discovery, examines trauma, survival, and reclaiming the self. Her book Ninety Seconds: What Nursing Taught Me Between Breakdowns and Bad Shifts draws from fifteen years in healthcare, bringing together humor, compassion, professional experience, and lessons learned in scrubs.

With The Maps We Make, Cherie turns toward poetry to explore love, grief, anxiety, childhood wounds, nursing, resilience, and the ongoing process of becoming whole.

Where the Map Leads

The Maps We Make feels personal because it allows difficult experiences to retain their complexity. Pain, care, desire, fear, service, and hope all belong within its landscape.

Cherie’s collection ultimately reflects how people build meaning from what they’ve lived through. Every poem marks another place along that journey, creating a map shaped by memory, healing, relationships, and the continuing choice to move forward.