Gestalt - Paperback

Gestalt is a poetry chapbook with autobiographical poems on the topic of pain and growth. The work details different facets of pain I've dealt with from child- to adulthood, while the final few works on the pages delineate a life sprouting away from pain and suffering, ending the manuscript on a hopeful note. The topics covered across the poems include emotional abuse, untreated mental illness, fear, emotional and sexual repression, and self-acceptance. The book itself is meant to break a cycle. There's a flow of trauma that is then disrupted by a breakthrough, which is not meant to be overwhelmingly and falsely positive. The final five poems are examples of weaving the positive into the fabric of a painful life and changing the appearance of that life's tapestry.

Each poem is accompanied with an illustration, and the poems themselves are formatted in a way that plays with space on the page. As an artist, I enjoy using space, and I found myself limited in traditional forms of poetry. The way I experience the world, my poems need to be hypervisual in order to be expressed and understood, while the space interferes with how the audience interacts with the work, forcing them to slow down or consider a different way of reading the work than they might have previously thought. The poems presented and how they're presented embody a lesson I've had to learn time and again---that in order to be authentic, I must create my own form rather than trying to ascribe to the mold of others.