by Lynnell Edwards, poetry faculty and associate programs director
On the eve of the Kentucky Book Festival last November, a novelist friend came up to me at the writer’s reception and joked, “I saw that you were on the trauma panel.” I laughed, realizing of course, yes, my new release, The Bearable Slant of Light, had in fact landed me a moderator spot on a panel of authors whose new works grappled with stories of mental health and difficult life paths. Initially, I wasn’t sure what to make of this new categorization of my work, though I couldn’t very well deny that the book’s core poems, with their focus on my younger son’s onset and struggle with bipolar disorder, did, in fact, represent ten years of trauma for him, and for our family.
But what I didn’t then realize was that this focus would open up a whole new set of forums for sharing my work. While of course I hoped that the work would find readers among lovers of poetry generally, including the academic poetry community, as it has turned out, spending a year on the “trauma panel”—or, more accurately, the “trauma circuit”—has allowed me to take the work to audiences well beyond the ones I initially envisioned.