Pieces Of Me

A Journey from Broken to Becoming

Some feelings are too big for words.
Some words become poems.
And some poems become pieces of who we are.

A collection of emotion, observation, anger, longing, hope, and becoming — Pieces of Me is the poetic world of thirteen-year-old Padmakshi KamalaKannan, where every feeling finds a voice and every fragment becomes part of a larger story.

Meet Padmakshi KamalaKannan

Thirteen. Curious. Creative. Unafraid to Feel.

Padmakshi KamalaKannan is thirteen years old and already a force difficult to define in a single sentence.

She is a dancer who moves between hip-hop, Bollywood, and Bharatanatyam, a badminton player, a swimmer, and a voracious reader with a particular weakness for romantasy. With Billie Eilish often playing in the background, Padmakshi moves through life with the same intensity, curiosity, and emotional openness that finds its way into her poetry.

She does not experience the world from just one perspective. She dances through it, reads it, observes it, questions it — and writes about it.

The Story Behind The Words

One Lost Poem. One Promise. A Beginning.

Padmakshi wrote her first poem when she was twelve.

It was written on a piece of paper that was accidentally lost.

Instead of allowing the loss to end the story, she made herself a promise:

Every word she writes from then on will be preserved.

Pieces of Me is the first proof of that promise.

It is not simply a collection of poems. It is a record of feelings, thoughts, questions, and moments captured before they could disappear.

The Heart Of Pieces Of Me

It Is Not About Having All the Answers.

This collection does not promise simple solutions.

Instead, it gives emotions a place to exist.

It acknowledges that growing up can mean feeling many contradictory things at once — anger and tenderness, sadness and hope, uncertainty and courage.

The poems remind us that we are all made of fragments:

the things we remember,
the things we lose,
the things we feel,
the things we survive,
and the things we become.

About the Book

A Journey from Broken to Becoming

What does it feel like to be thirteen?
To carry the weight of a world you are still learning to understand.
To rage against its injustices.
To ache for love.
To feel trapped one moment and hopeful the next.
To search — again and again — for the light on the other side.
Pieces of Me enters that complicated space through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old mind that refuses to look away.
These poems move through the full spectrum of human emotion — from the heaviness of feeling trapped and the fury of witnessing injustice, to longing, vulnerability, reflection, and the hard-won brightness of hope.
Written with emotional range and a natural instinct for imagery, rhythm, and expression, the poems do not shy away from difficult feelings.
They sit with darkness.
They question it.
And then, slowly, they find a way forward.