The Prelude Girl: Marjorie Gavan’s Poems Turn Almost-Love into Anthem
The Prelude Girl is a collection of poems authored by Marjorie Gavan and it uses a book cover image shot by photographer Mike Alegado. The author and the publisher have the paid license and permission to use the image from the photographer.
There’s a word for the person who arrives just before destiny does. Marjorie Gavan calls her the prelude girl — “an introduction before the main act.”
In her debut poetry collection, The Prelude Girl, Gavan transforms that ache into luminous testimony. Each of the 26 poems (with three additional, exclusive pieces in the hardcover edition) is a stepping stone: from clandestine hope, to disorienting heartbreak, to the moment you cut the thread yourself and walk away still whole.
From “Placeholder” to Prelude
The title was born in the middle of writing — out of a need to rename pain without erasing it. “Placeholder,” Gavan told us, “is the word people use when you’re someone kept out of convenience.” Accurate, yes — but blunt, dismissive. Prelude Girl felt different: still honest, but human. A way to reclaim agency. I may not have been the one, but I’m a whole person with real feelings. I was a woman who loved and tried. Naming herself was the first act of repair.
Writing to Survive
When the relationship ended, the realization hit late. “I didn’t know I was just a placeholder until it ended. I guess I was naïve; I thought it meant more.” The earliest poems were uncensored spills—“unrefined, incoherent… pain in its rawest form, filled with rage, loneliness, and misery.” Most of them started life in the Notes app on her phone (she laughs that her handwriting is illegible), proof that survival writing rarely waits for the perfect notebook.
A Line That Still Hurts — And Heals
Ask Gavan for one line that still lands in the gut, and she cites a moment from This Is How I Loved You:
“It was my throne, yet I was the one afraid that you would let it go.”
Love shifts power in strange ways. The person you’re most afraid to lose can undo you. That line sits at the pivot point in the collection — the dawning awareness that fear has quietly ceded sovereignty.
The Emotional Texture (and the Quiet Filipino Shadow)
You won’t find overt national imagery in these poems — no jeepneys, no festivals, no mango metaphors. Yet Gavan suspects the emotional restraint is Filipino: the holding-in, the quiet endurance, the staying even when it hurts. That emotional architecture — rather than visual markers — carries cultural DNA through the book.
Literary echoes ripple underneath: Sylvia Plath’s intensity; Louise Glück’s clean, cold precision; Yrsa Daley-Ward’s intimate directness; and the atmospheric interiority of Marguerite Duras. Still, the voice here is unmistakably Marjorie — private, defiant, tender, unshowy.
Moving On (For Real This Time)
For too long, she replayed the relationship, rewriting scenes in her head: What if I’d done this? Said that? Finishing the manuscript became a line in the sand. “I realized the mental rewrites meant I hadn’t truly moved on,” she says. Completing The Prelude Girl was the moment she stopped bargaining with the past and accepted its ending. The poems don’t ask for closure; they document what it took to reach one on her own terms.
“An Embrace, a Hug Through Paper”
Marjorie hopes readers nursing fresh heartbreak will feel held. “We live in a time where expressing emotion can be seen as either powerful or pathetic,” she says. Labels — bitter, pick-me — get thrown around carelessly. The Prelude Girl answers back: grief over lost love is human, universal, and nothing to be ashamed of. “Some people are just meant to pass through your life,” Gavan reminds us. “And that’s okay.”
Who Should Read The Prelude Girl?
Anyone who’s ever wondered if they were just a chapter in someone else’s story.
Readers who loved the emotional candor of Rupi Kaur or Yrsa Daley-Ward but want something quieter, steadier.
Book clubs exploring grief, self-respect, or the messy middle ground between dating and commitment.
Friends looking for a meaningful gift for someone freshly heartbroken.
Formats & Where to Buy
Kindle eBook — Preorder here. The eBook goes live on August 30.
Paperback — Purchase here. A keepsake you can dog-ear, annotate, and gift.
Hardcover Collector’s Edition — Coming soon. It includes three bonus poems not found in other formats.
The Prelude Girl by Marjorie Gavan is published by HRBN Publishing (Haribon Publishing).