Jenna Galder
Poetry • Essays • Reflections
Words for the things we carry quietly.
Idle Storms
Idle Storms offers a profound lyrical journey through the internal climates we navigate and the personal upheavals we endure.
With lyrical grace and steady resonance, Jenna Galder navigates the landscapes of isolation, affection, recollection, and the ongoing path toward the self. These verses travel through mourning and defiance, vulnerability and accountability, probing the essence of occupying one's space, establishing limits, and embracing personal worth without hesitation.
Idle Storms focuses not on the turbulence itself, but on the aftermath of the gale—the quietude, the healing, and the new perspective. It is a work dedicated to those holding unvoiced burdens, those who love deeply, and those discovering, step by honest step, how to finally find peace in their own skin.
Borrowed Space
Across eighteen poems, this collection moves from a childhood spent learning to disappear to a life spent learning to stay — through motherhood and heartbreak, through the particular ache of loving children who aren't quite yours to claim, through the quiet, ordinary work of rebuilding a self in the space everyone else left behind. These are poems about the rooms we're given, the rooms we're denied, and the ones we draft for ourselves when no one hands us the blueprint.
Unflinching and unsentimental, Borrowed Space refuses easy resolution in favor of something truer: the daily choice to keep believing in your own goodness, even in the rooms you can't fully light.
For anyone who has ever had to build a home out of what they were never given
Salt
On Ordinary Love
In Salt, Jenna Galder turns her attention to the moments most of us rush past — a bag of fries handed over after a hard day, a fish tank argument that was never about the fish tank, fifty-five miles ridden into the wind on a bike she almost fell off of in the parking lot. Across twenty-four personal essays, Galder writes about blended family life, motherhood and its long, uneven letting-go, marriage's ordinary friction and its quiet repair, the weight of being seen — or mistaken — for who you actually are, and the slow work of reclaiming a voice she'd learned to make smaller.
These essays don't argue for a bigger life. They argue for a truer one — one built from grocery runs and late-night phone calls and the people who show up, again and again, without being asked. Warm without being sentimental, and honest about the parts of love that are hard to admit out loud, Salt is a book for anyone who has ever wondered whether an unremarkable life could still be a full one.
The answer, quietly, is yes.
The Voice Behind the Words
Jenna Galder writes from lived experience, not to define it, but to sit with it. Her poetry is shaped by years of becoming: by movement between places, roles, languages, and identities; by love and loss; by the quiet work of healing that happens long after the noise has passed. She writes slowly, intentionally, and with respect for silence, believing that some truths need space before they can be named.
Jenna’s words often emerge from the in-between moments: early mornings, restless thoughts, pauses in conversation, the stillness that follows emotional storms. Her work does not rush resolution. Instead, it honors the process, the lingering, the unlearning, the growth that unfolds on its own timeline.
This space exists for readers who recognize themselves in quiet resilience, for those who have survived, are still becoming, and are learning how to breathe again.
A Note to the Reader
These poems were written slowly, across years, seasons, and change.
They were not created to impress or explain, but to sit with what lingers.
My words live in the space between noise and clarity, where emotions soften and meaning begins to surface on its own time. The words here do not rush resolution. They offer companionship instead, a pause, a recognition, a place to breathe.
If something in these pages feels familiar, you are not alone.
If a line stays with you longer than expected, it has done its work.
Thank you for being here.