P068 Inside/Outside, Language Distrubed
In 2012, poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner precipitously lost feeling in, and use of, her left side. The mini-stroke passed quickly but was symptomatic of something larger: a tear in the lining of an artery known as the tunica intima.
This long-poem memoir tracks the author’s experiences with un/wellness and un/re-familiarity with herself. Trauma Head disturbs and disorders language and syntax to reconcile appearance with experience.
Winner of the Cogswell Award for Literary Excellence, shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and long listed for the Souster Award, Trauma Head has inspired vivid responses from fellow poets:
Intimate and powerful. An astonishing paradox as Elee Kraljii Gardiner stages a series of verbal break-throughs in her poetic testimony to what is incommunicable during and after a stroke.
Daphne Marlett
The unit of composition in Trauma Head is the page used as a mirror, a reflection of the synapses detonated by the poet as she triggers the intricate mechanisms of language. Elee Kraljii Gardiner seizes this linguistic dream (traum) world with skill and playfulness; these are poems to wake up from.
Fred Wah
Poet and editor Elee Kraljii Gardiner is a Director of Vancouver Manuscript Intensive.
She is the founder and creative mentor of Thursdays Writing Collective, a non-profit organization of Vancouver's downtown eastside writers, and editor and publisher of eight of its anthologies.
Trauma Head and her previous book of poetry, serpentine loop were published by Anvil Press. Order her books from the publisher or your favourite bookstore. Visit Elee's website for links to her recent publications and interviews.
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