Trauma Decor

The title poem for the chapbook Trauma Décor which was finalist in the Midwestern Writing Center's Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest carries the chapbook's often-present theme of a protagonist's apocalyptic foreboding set in motion here by an oversaturation of terror images delivered by a 24-hour American news cycle. An acutely drawn arena of adolescent growth in a world on the brink is frequently depicted from a midwestern perspective especially evident in the poems Gargantuan Life on Mars and Charlton Heston is Dead recently anthologized in Teresa Chuc's Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in our Hands. While the body of poems often pose more questions than answers regarding the self-fracturing happenings of familial loss societal violence climate-change and addiction these questions effectively function as an ever-present texture that inhabits the chapbook.