A Family Apart
Abstract
The poems in this autobiographical collection explore the brokenness of family. I asked myself what does it mean to be a part of a family, to live in a family that is broken apart? I began this project with the belief that much of my material would take on the difficult task of writing about trauma that created fracture in my own family’s make-up. Marital separation, abuse, illness, death; these struggles seemed to be the cause of my family’s brokenness. Yet, what I found as I wrote was that trauma itself is not really responsible for the dysfunction in a family. It is in the aftermath of a crisis when individuals in a family must decide how to deal with the offending issues and interact with one another that will determine if the family will survive the breakage. My poems probe the individual relationships within my family under the strain of fracture.
Description
Keywords
Family, Brokenness, Trauma, Relationships, Autobiography, Healing