Trauma Styles

As an ER nurse, she knew the day might come when her greatest fear happened, and after her husband of 10 years dies in her trauma bay, moving on feels impossible. Struggling to overcome her loss, Elle Conroy navigates the world the only way she thinks she can. Thrown from the top ranks of her career and drawn into the false comfort that diverted narcotics and alcohol bring, she fights to survive in an environment where daily reminders of her tragedy occur.

Colliding with and confronting Shakespeare's The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal beautifully evoke the poet's Jamaican childhood and reach beyond to explore history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic and intricately woven.

This is a collection of poems inspired by love, loss of love, and other tragic and traumatic events that began in late July of 2000—so some poems are about love and others about the loss of that love. This is my autobiography in poetry form.