Midseason

Midseason is a book of poems in three sections that explores a woman’s identity between the seasons of daughterhood and motherhood. At once, she is the daughter of drug addicts and the stand-in mother to a sibling battling mental illness. She then carries this narrative into her own nuclear family and the marital relationship, as both mother and wife. In the middle of these two familiar worlds, there is a blank space. Not a clean, empty slate or a fresh pallet of possibility, but an embodied disfigurement from the traumas of loss, abuse, and neglect. This work is a reclamation of that blank space - a poetic emergence into identity transformation. Countless women encounter this dilemma of prolapsed identity from their gendered role as caregivers in society. By extension, the narratives taking place in this book are drawn not only from a well of personal experience, but from the oceans of feminine condition. These poems born from loss and trauma are a shared, collective experience whose evolution is explored through variations of metaphor, form, sound, and rhythm. Elements of the Earth recur as poignant metaphors for physicality and landscape, and become intertwined with spiritual and magical images that harmonize the form with the theme. Just as with the seasons of the Earth, there are shifting seasons of our lives, and this book aims to encapsulate that ever-allusive midseason, the time and experience where we are neither who we were, or who we are yet to become.