Survivor's Guilt |
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Author:
| Mallory, Julia |
ISBN: | 978-1-64713-762-5 |
Publication Date: | Oct 2019 |
Publisher: | Primedia eLaunch LLC
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Book Format: | Paperback |
List Price: | USD $17.00 |
Book Description:
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Survivor's Guilt is a monumental meditation on grief and the aftermath of loss. These poems and essays are difficult but necessary in a time of digital death archives and extrajudicial killings. The writer is trying to understand what it means to live in a world of pervasive, premature Black death.Born from the author's lived experience with personal tragedy, her 17 year old son Julian was shot and killed in 2017, three weeks after his birthday, this collection is also an archive of...
More DescriptionSurvivor's Guilt is a monumental meditation on grief and the aftermath of loss. These poems and essays are difficult but necessary in a time of digital death archives and extrajudicial killings. The writer is trying to understand what it means to live in a world of pervasive, premature Black death.Born from the author's lived experience with personal tragedy, her 17 year old son Julian was shot and killed in 2017, three weeks after his birthday, this collection is also an archive of survivorship. Survivor's Guilt wrestles with the curious reality that parenting while Black has never been a neutral existence. She dedicates 17 stanzas to Antwon Rose II, a 17 year old Black teenager slain by an East Pittsburgh police officer in 2018.While we may know more about trauma than ever before, what is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to many communities where the trauma is not "post" but instead perpetual and persistent? How does our online connectivity affect our grief? And what do we do with our collective grief?Grief is universal and still an emotional experience that too few feel they can afford to participate in. Who gets to grieve and for how long? What do we do when people defy our expectations around what they should do with their sadness?Survivor's Guilt doesn't let us off the hook. Yet, if we are able to be defiant in the face of destruction and refuse to look away, it will remind us that grief is the evidence of having loved and why we should always remember the love.