Altars of Survival is a series of poetry collections born from the sacred mess of life, loss, and resilience. Each book is its own altar: a place to lay down grief, awe, rage, devotion, and survival. Together, they form a lineage of witness, honoring mothers, midwives, daughters, and all who carry both scars and light.
Books in the Series
VOLUME 01 — AVAILABLE NOW
Blood, Milk, and Thunder
Birth is chaos.
It is blood and rupture, lullaby and thunder.
It is laughter tangled up with grief, milk flooding the world, silence that breaks the strongest hearts.
This debut collection is an altar to the sacred mess of birth, loss, and survival. It weaves together raw truths of pregnancy, postpartum, midwifery, and grief into poems that are not tidy, but holy.
For mothers. For midwives. For anyone who has carried awe and anguish in the same breath.
VOLUME 02 — COMING SOON
Bone, Breath, and Fire
Where Blood, Milk, and Thunder witnesses chaos and grief, Bone, Breath, and Fire rises from the ashes.
This second collection is about survival, resilience, rage, joy, and the fierce endurance of ancestry.
It is for those who know what it means to burn and rebuild, to carry scars and still spark light.
VOLUME 03 — IN PROGRESS
Daughter, Forgive the Fire
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This book is for my daughters—and for every mother who has passed down both wounds and love.
Daughter, Forgive the Fire is an unflinching and tender meditation on motherhood, cycles of trauma, and the awe of watching daughters bloom fierce and luminous despite it all.
— Also by Carrissa Smith —
ETERNAL DUSK SERIES — BOOK ONE
If you came here from the birth world and you're curious about the fiction — yes, I also write zombie apocalypse novels. They're about survival too. Just a different kind.