Sadness & Sadness Accessories

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Would you give up anything and everything to be yourself? This is the aftermath of transition and I sort through the wreckage looking for the pieces of me that still have life in them. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>If there is nothing new under the sun then Aurora's poems lie tucked beneath a shade tree. As Aurora examines how appearance can be a false advertisement for inward essence she starts with her own experience-what it's like to know you are a woman before being seen as one-and proceeds to shake other things free from their faulty labels. She describes teaching students as they write essays about the National Anthem / as though it isn't a song celebrating the beauty / of a bombing. She reveals the lack of imagination of author JK Rowling-lauded for dreaming up wizards with powers of transformation but failing to see that magic was in [the trans community] the whole time. Enough of lying labels of what's been in the sunlight so long it's grown stale her poems seem to say. Aurora craves the satisfaction [...] of seeing yourself as indelible / instead of a ghost haunting your own life. She unflinchingly brings the inner outward with a fresh voice that will fill [the]room even though it sometimes still doesn't have room for [her]. This collection of poems is a fresh exploration not only of gender motherhood and the trans experience but of humanity. It is essential reading for those tired of obvious narratives sun-parched and withering. It offers company and clarity for readers digging into the rich dirt of their interior selves looking for the tender and explosive seeds that Aurora believes are begging for our care.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>- Amy Barger</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Vulnerable restorative liberating-Aurora shouts not into the void but across the chasms of time and memory in this arresting collection of poetry. She weaves an odyssey of self-love and acceptance that feels melancholic at times and triumphant in others but always </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>always</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> hauntingly tender. </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>Sadness and Sadness Accessories</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)> is such a necessary body of work in a world where authenticity has become a business and grief an industry. The experiences and emotions we wade through are almost confrontational in their honesty and in many regards being a reader here feels more like bearing witness to an excavation of self. As Aurora digs into the viscera of womanhood through fraught introspections on love mothering and femininity she offers herself up as an eternal work in progress in the best way-a woman always changing evolving and blooming. She reminds us that what of the world we cannot bear we conjure with words instead. </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(34 34 34 1)>- Kaylan Freeman</span></p>