According to the back of the book, Kelsey Bigelow’s Far From Broken (2024) collection is “an expansion of her spoken word album Depression Holders and Secret Keepers” which was released in advance of the book. I haven’t heard Bigelow’s work aloud, but I can say that there were several poems which seemed so clearly meant for the stage that I could hear them in my head.
In the poems “Poetic Trigger Warning” and “My Bed Called Me Again Today,” the rhythm is so clear; because of that (and despite my reading habits being such that I read poems by sentence rather than line), I was forced to read the spaces and line breaks in these poems when I wouldn’t otherwise.
While I believe that some of these pieces were written for the page, the sounds of the words seem to have been given equal importance as the definitions of those words, which is, I think, an indication of Bigelow’s process…