Testimonies in Verse: A Quiet Power in “Lines Worth Remembering” by Esperanza Pretila

Lines Worth Remembering: A BREW Poetry Award 2024 Collection

• Esperanza Pretila
• Fiction
• Poetry, Literary Fiction
• 07-Jul-2025

Reading Lines Worth Remembering feels less like opening a book and more like unlocking a door you didn’t know you’d shut. It’s not trying to change the world in sweeping gestures. Instead, it speaks in smaller truths—the kind that sit in your chest long after you’ve put the book down. This anthology doesn’t shout its significance. It trusts you to find it.

At times, the poems read like they were written in the margins of a life—jotted during a lunch break, whispered before sleep, caught in the middle of remembering. And that’s exactly what gives them strength. There’s a rawness here that resists performance. These poems weren’t written for applause. They were written because the writers needed to say something—urgently, sincerely, sometimes quietly, always earnestly.

You’ll notice how unpolished some pieces feel—and that’s a compliment. There’s bravery in messiness. A poem that trembles at the edges can carry more truth than one that’s airtight and rhetorical. And this book knows that. It doesn’t curate for perfection; it curates for pulse. The result is an anthology that doesn’t just showcase poetic skill but reveals lived emotion: awkward, unresolved, tender, defiant.

What binds the collection isn’t a theme so much as a sensibility. A willingness to be transparent. You’ll find grief, yes. Love, plenty. But also disillusionment, ecological anxiety, self-questioning, quiet redemption, and that specific kind of joy that doesn’t feel like shouting from rooftops—it feels like a small exhale after a long-held breath.

You won’t be told how to feel. There are no moral footnotes or conclusions drawn for you. The editors let the poems speak in their own voices, and the diversity of tone, age, and perspective means you’ll never fall into rhythm long enough to get comfortable. Which is a good thing. Comfort dulls us. This collection wants to keep you awake.

In a time when we’re inundated with sleek content and curated personas, Lines Worth Remembering offers something more fragile and therefore more lasting. It’s not entertainment. It’s testimony. And if you let it, it will teach you how to listen all over again.

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.