In her startling debut, Anna Knowles lays bare the suburban violence and wrenching pain that bely clean white picket fences and houses neatly aligned down neighborhood streets. In the haunting shadow of the Rocky Mountains, from cowboy restaurants and Coors Field to Columbine High School and AA meeting spaces, her poetry explores how fear, pain, and anguish can unexpectedly take hold and settle into the smallest spaces within us.

By never shying away from the darkness, Knowles illuminates what it truly means to portray grit, to survive, to take root and bloom. These poems include strong yet imperfect characters struggling against addiction, grief, and hopelessness. Charged moments of rebellion and grief coexist alongside love and care. Conditions of the Wounded disrupts expectations and challenges us to look deep beyond the surface.

I wanted to know how to plot a course through her threatening lungs. But if fear was a house, it was ours. Absence of breath struck us down each heart-shaken day.- Excerpt from ‘Conditions of the Wounded