Being Heard: Healing Voices of Trauma: A Collection of Writings

by Vera Stasny

Overview

This collection of deeply introspective poems reflects Vera's inner voice in response to her unrecognized and unfelt personal traumas and shocks. She writes about loss, pain, joy, love, fear, memories, and death. The poems, written over a four-year period, emerged from moments of silence. They give voice to that which otherwise might remain lost or hidden. They reflect her previously unexpressed emotions underlying life's traumatic experiences. The voices within compelled her to bring them forth on her healing journey.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982266141
Publisher:	Balboa Press
Publication date:	03/28/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	94
File size:	389 KB

About the Author

VERA STASNY has been a lifelong learner and seeker who is drawn to the unexplainable and unseen. She has pursued training in many life energy healing modalities, the Enneagram, CranioSacral therapy, Sufi healing, and other natural healing therapies. Vera, now happily retired, had successful careers in education and finance. She divides her time between NYC and Vermont, and is committed to living a healthy, enjoyable, and fulfilled life.

Contact Vera at www.HealingVoicesofTrauma.com

Editorial Reviews

2019-04-04
A debut collection details the ways that poetry can help transform pain into hope and healing.

In the early 1990s, literary critics began arguing that poems might serve as effective vehicles for expressing psychic suffering. Or, as the eminent critic Geoffrey Hartman put it, verse might help people "read the wound" of trauma. Stasny seems to take this belief as an article of faith in her collection, which seeks to put some of her own deepest hurts into poetic form. The book opens with the aptly titled "Trauma," which begins: "Snippets of memory. / Emotions vivid and too frightening / haunt and disrupt us. / Will we dare to reveal them? / Or keep them buried in the recesses of our brains and / trapped in our bodies?" The answer to this last question, for the poet at least, seems to be a resounding no, and the pages that follow feature her efforts to bring these haunting emotions to the surface with the help of the written word. Stasny uses a variety of imagery and metaphors to try to express her pain to others. At times, her traumas turn her life into a roller coaster: "I am calm, relaxed… / then some thought enters unannounced into my / consciousness / and the panic sets in. / I stop breathing properly and start holding my breath. / My stomach churns." Here and elsewhere, the author is particularly good at demonstrating the ways in which psychic pain lodges in the body—how mental strife has physical effects. She makes readers feel the shortness of her breath and the churning in her gut. But even in such struggles, there is hope, and her verse also testifies to the possibility of recovery: "A heart hidden away by an invisible wall is a broken heart. / It can be repaired. / It can be mended. / It can be restored. / This is an invitation." Her moving book is an invitation as well—one those suffering from trauma would do well to accept.

Touching poems that show readers both the storm and the calm that can follow.

Kirkus Reviews