In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 230.
Once we are ready to write poems of trauma, once we have learned how to take good care of ourselves so that the poems can emerge more easily, what comes next? Sometimes writing one or two poems that engage with the traumatic is enough—to come to terms with difficult knowledge, with those painful stories we feel compelled to tell. But frequently—as I’ve seen when mentoring graduate students as well as with my own creative process—those initial poems can lead to more poems and, eventually, to a book-length manuscript.
Years ago I wrote a collection of prose poems. These were slender newspaper columns of verse about a trauma that had shadowed my mother her entire adult life and that had shaped my psychology as well: what I believed about the vulnerability of women’s bodies, the kinds of threats that crouched around every corner. When she was nineteen my mother was held hostage by the handyman who worked in her building. In the middle of the night, he broke into her apartment, beat her when she tried to fight back, then held a knife to her throat, saying over and over, Tell me a story. Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you. Following this experience, my grandfather forced my mother (who grew up in Honduras) into an arranged marriage with a wealthy man she didn’t love in El Salvador. Eventually she was able to leave the relationship and return to the United States. Her father—furious at his daughter’s disobedience—sat shiva for my mother as if she were already dead.
Collections that examine traumatic experience pose unique challenges for the poet. Trauma can become an obsessive loop. The mind won’t stop revisiting the pain, examining its many facets, holding the trauma in different lights to see how it glints. Poetry books that center on trauma often enact obsessive thinking, a speaker fixated on pain. These collections can risk feeling constrictive. Therefore, the poet must work to create multiple entry points into the trauma, offering different vantages, even pauses in the narrative that function as breathing room. To hold a reader’s attention, the poet must use a wide range of craft-based strategies. Even the most awful, shocking stories can bore or numb us if the teller doesn’t vary how the tales are told.
In Beth Bachmann’s remarkable debut collection, Temper (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), a sister is found murdered, and the primary suspect is the father. Temper doesn’t try to solve the crime; rather, Bachmann focuses on writing poems that mimic the skittering, uneasy process of attempting to face extreme trauma. The book verges on claustrophobic, its poems densely sonic, allusive, but also anesthetized. Still, in the second section of the collection, which opens with a poem titled “A New Way of Thinking About Space,” Bachmann shifts away from talking about the sister’s murder in purely familial terms and begins to speak ekphrastically: “In Giotto’s cross we see for the first time the weight of the body pulling against the wood. / This is the moment after the accusation of the father, when the effects of gravity / take over. It’s a break with the past, a refusal to stylize the holy, an opening / of the plane.” The rest of the section makes heavy use of Catholic iconography and the mysteries of the rosary. While Bachmann never allows us to forget she’s writing about a murdered sister, the poems in the middle portion of the book offer the reader new insights and perspectives on this trauma via religious figuration.
Even when a book-length exploration of trauma refuses to let the reader look away from the obsessive nature of such pain, it remains necessary to vary narrative and aesthetic strategies to keep the reader engaged. In Matt Rasmussen’s Black Aperture (Louisiana State University Press, 2013), the poet scrutinizes the suicide of a brother. The collection is a sustained effort to make sense of the brother’s choice and to explain the absence that this kind of death leaves behind. Throughout the book Rasmussen is fixated on certain talismanic images: a bullet and bullet hole, piles of orange-hued autumn leaves, falling snow, empty fields. The repetition of these images forces us to revisit earlier moments in the collection, so that we too become obsessive in our movement through the text.
The dominant mode of Black Aperture is surrealism. Rasmussen has a gift for evoking the nightmarish aftermath of a suicide through dizzying, discombobulating metaphors. But some of the book’s most powerful and effective poems are grounded in the specificity of small, very real objects. For example, in “Outgoing,” the speaker describes recording a new message on the family’s answering machine. The poem does contain brief moments of surrealism, as when the speaker imagines his brother’s voice. “Hello, I have just shot myself. / To leave a message for me, call hell.” Still, “Outgoing” is most compelling in those places where Rasmussen evokes the ordinary, mechanical act of recording a greeting on a cassette tape: “I pressed record / and laid my voice over yours, muting it forever // and even now. I’m sorry we are not here, I began.” Rasmussen’s “Outgoing” reminds the reader that this trauma is devastating, replete with terrible silences, and all too real. By shifting between dreamlike landscapes and the waking realities of a family’s grief, Rasmussen ensures that the poems never lose their potency for readers. In a book-length collection each exploration of loss should offer us some new insight into trauma and the wound it leaves behind.
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of three books of nonfiction and ten poetry collections, including most recently Civilians (Louisiana State University Press, 2025). A craft book, The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma, will be published by University of New Mexico Press in Fall 2025. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas.
image credit: Spencer Demera