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Set on the trans-Siberian railway, these poems take up themes of mobility as well as the body and the self created through loss. In the collection, loss is generated through travel as it strips away the mundane routines used to define ourselves, such as homes, careers, families. For example, one poem focuses on the interaction between the speaker and an elderly Russian woman who perceives something evil in the speaker’s surgery scars despite the brief encounter. In each poem, we see the speaker evolving and redefining self-identity through location, through unexpected connections and disconnections, through the present and the past. Dorris focuses on the body’s role in mobility and self-creation because she has a genetic bone disorder which causes benign tumors, or osteocondromas, to form at her joints. As she grew, so did the tumors interfering with normal growth patterns; her right leg is shorter, her right arm is several inches longer, and she has strange knobs of bone sticking out. All that said, she walks, jogs if she must, dances and hopscotches (although not gracefully). For years she avoided writing about disability because she wanted to avoid sounding melodramatic and self-pitying, but while completing an MFA, she realized her disability colored the way she perceives the world and her role inside it; consequently, her poetics lean towards erasing, running, and eventually disassembling illusions, as well as contributing to the dialogue of disability poetics.
