Gestalt

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. T