More on: trauma

For Aciek Arok Deng I leave the camp, unable to breathe, me Freud girl, after her interior, she Lost Girl, after my purse, her face: dark as eggplant, her gaze: unpinnable, untraceable, floating, open, defying the gravity I was told keeps pain in place maybe trauma doesn’t harden, packed, tight as sediment at the bottom…

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…

When I was wounded whether by God, the devil, or myself —I don’t know yet which— it was seeing the sparrows again and clumps of clover, after three days, that told me I hadn’t died. When I was young, all it took were those sparrows, those lush little leaves, for me to sing praises, dedicate…

M Y SISTER, SONDRA, stood on my porch smoking a cigarette, just like she does every Wednesday while her son practices soccer at the school three blocks from my house. “Alisa, you ever been around one of them savants? Like the one that was in that movie Rain Man?” Cigarette smoke rose and fought against the…

Without Sanctuary Aftermath and Visions in Contemporary American Fiction What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher R. Beha (Tin House Books, 2012) Enon by Paul Harding (Random House, 2013) I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro (Grove Press, 2013) THE SPONTANEOUS and unremembered wanderings of an amnesiac are often called a fugue state. But the word…

THAT YEAR IN INDIANA, June landed like a fire arrow. It was surprising, and—for the immediate avenue it opened with those strangers who demanded interaction with Jan in the grocery line or at the gas pump—a relief. She knew she could sigh a little, wag her head as if asked to bear a great and…