The title poem for the chapbook, Trauma Decor, which was finalist in the Midwestern Writing Center’s Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest, carries the chapbook’s often-present theme of a protagonist’s apocalyptic foreboding set in motion, here, by an oversaturation of terror images delivered by a 24-hour American news cycle. An acutely drawn arena of adolescent growth in a world on the brink is frequently depicted from a midwestern perspective, especially evident in the poems Gargantuan,
Life on Mars, and Charlton Heston is Dead, recently anthologized in Teresa Chuc’s Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in our Hands. While the body of poems often pose more questions than answers regarding the self-fracturing happenings of familial loss, societal violence, climate-change, and addiction, these questions effectively function as an ever-present texture that inhabits the chapbook.