I Won't Paint You Flowers, by Scott Jordan Frink

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features. I Won’t Paint You Flowers is a collection of poetry that refuses to romanticize suffering. Instead, it drags pain into the light unadorned, unedited, and unashamed. With sharp, minimalist lines, Scott Jordan Frink confronts themes of addiction, mental illness, and survival in a world more interested in diagnosis than understanding. These poems are written in the burn—moments of emotional urgency and clarity that resist polish in favor of truth. Yet beneath the chaos lies the faint heartbeat of hope, not as a promise but as a possibility. This is not a redemption arc. It’s a reckoning—and a refusal to be silenced. Scott Jordan Frink is a poet, advocate, and the founding editor of The Broken Spine Journal, a space for raw, lived experience. He began writing as a means of survival, not publication—discarding each piece after it had served its purpose. Only recently did he begin saving his work, realizing the voice that helped him endure might help someone else. His poetry is instinctive, emotionally unpolished, and unapologetically honest. He doesn’t write to impress—he writes to connect, endure, and stay true. Though never praised in academic circles, his work has moved people deeply in therapeutic spaces, where reaction matters more than recognition.