BEING HEARD

A debut collection details the ways that poetry can help transform pain into hope and healing.

In the early 1990s, literary critics began arguing that poems might serve as effective vehicles for expressing psychic suffering. Or, as the eminent critic Geoffrey Hartman put it, verse might help people “read the wound” of trauma. Stasny seems to take this belief as an article of faith in her collection, which seeks to put some of her own deepest hurts into poetic form. The book opens with the aptly titled “Trauma,” which begins: “Snippets of memory. / Emotions vivid and too frightening / haunt and disrupt us. / Will we dare to reveal them? / Or keep them buried in the recesses of our brains and / trapped in our bodies?” The answer to this last question, for the poet at least, seems to be a resounding no, and the pages that follow feature her efforts to bring these haunting emotions to the surface with the help of the written word. Stasny uses a variety of imagery and metaphors to try to express her pain to others. At times, her traumas turn her life into a roller coaster: “I am calm, relaxed… / then some thought enters unannounced into my / consciousness / and the panic sets in. / I stop breathing properly and start holding my breath. / My stomach churns.” Here and elsewhere, the author is particularly good at demonstrating the ways in which psychic pain lodges in the body—how mental strife has physical effects. She makes readers feel the shortness of her breath and the churning in her gut. But even in such struggles, there is hope, and her verse also testifies to the possibility of recovery: “A heart hidden away by an invisible wall is a broken heart. / It can be repaired. / It can be mended. / It can be restored. / This is an invitation.” Her moving book is an invitation as well—one those suffering from trauma would do well to accept.

Touching poems that show readers both the storm and the calm that can follow.