| dc.description.abstract | As Herman writes, “The first principle of recovery is the empowerment of the survivor. She must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery.” Egg Harbor’s overall project is to move beyond its traumas by reconstructing fragmented narratives and reconceiving its inherited system of
images. The egret, for example, at first is conflated with violent/neglectful depictions of the parents (“the lone white bird who won’t / turn her head) but later transforms into the ars poetic reclamation “[the poem] snaps down, spears a frog, and swallows.” As acts of defiant utterance, the poems begin to turn the pathological internalization of the abuser into an active possession—“the understory / so dense, tangled to itself, that walking // a straight line becomes / a tight circle, and my mother’s voice is mine.” Thus, language begins to assert retroactive control, becoming a container in which the psychic discord of trauma might be stored, disembodied, and made into artifact, into myth—some kind of terrible beauty. | |
