Leadlight

Daniel Dyer
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:45:36 PDT

This collection of poems explores the spiritual experience of trauma and the diverse stimuli, such as violence, sexual abuse, loss, witness, and epiphany that may instigate fragmentation and repressions in the subconscious. The many allusions throughout the collection, from Homeric and Shakespearean characters to eastern religious figures, serve to imbue the work with a sense of variegation while also gentrifying and consecrating trauma. The poems take much inspiration from Jacques Lacan’s work on trauma, language, and the gaze, the writings of existentialists Sartre and Kierkegaard, and, of course, the poet’s own biography, and are arranged so as to suggest a coherent, albeit fragmented, narrative profluence. The collection as a whole attempts to emphasize the similarities between religious and traumatic experience and the ways in which language may or may not serve to reorient the traumatize mind.