Surviving Home by Katerina Canyon

Surviving Home by Katerina Canyon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Content Warning: Child Abuse and Neglect, racial trauma

I read Surviving Home in one Day. About 100 pages of poetry filled with trauma and abuse. There weren’t many poems that were hopeful to counteract the pain, but that is intentional and powerful. We shouldn’t have to add sweetness to make other people’s pain palatable.

“My pain is sculpted into art for you to consume” is one of the poems that best summarizes the collection. Katerina Canyon turns her painful memories into art. This is why she doesn’t have to add poems about hope or love. She is already turning her pain into something beautiful.

Reading these poems were powerful, but sometimes the really fanciful words took something out of it for me. They almost become a way of distance. But dissociation was also a theme within these poems, with the use of the first, second, and third person. These were ways to distance from all the pain.

I also like all the nature comparisons. We are animals, and we have similar habits. Survival and destruction are natural things.

I definitely recommend this poetry collection. Let it be pain turned into art that pushes us to do something, and not just another thing for us to look at and thank the universe our lives aren’t filled with that pain.

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Thank you to Book Publicity Services for my digital advance reader copy!

You can get your copy of Surviving Home here.

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