Description
Participating in the 2024 PopSugar reading challenge? Read Down the Foggy Streets of My Mind for prompt number 29: a book with a neurodivergent main character.
In June of 2023, Black Lawrence Press welcomed numerous existing and forthcoming Nomadic Press titles to our catalogue. Down the Foggy Streets of My Mind was originally published by Nomadic.
Down the Foggy Streets of My Mind is an ode to those of us who live with Dissociative Disorders such as PTSD and DID. It is an unapologetic anthem for survivors of sexual violence to rid themselves of being shamed and blamed in silence. When we tell our truth, we take back our power, as powerlessness lives in hiding.
Praise
In Down the Foggy Streets of My Mind, Kelliane Parker takes a scalpel to Dissociative Identity Disorder, trauma, stigma, survivorship, and the precarious endurance of the human heart. Her words are at turns haunting, charred, urgent, and beautifully alive. These poems carve resiliency into the silence of abuse until the word that rings loudest and clearest is healing. It’s challenging and startling, a remembering, a fragmenting, and ultimately, a resurrection.
-Anna Pulley, Author of Transgressions and Lesbian Sex Haiku Book (with Cats!)
This is a collection that wraps the mind around a journey replete with bravery. It is an intricate look at how to navigate the waters of trauma. The poetry in this manuscript faces the many truths society too often turns away from, and leads the reader to “see the forest beyond”. “Breathing here takes practice” as the poet tells us, through each and every stanza.
These poems open our eyes to importance of the flick of a light switch, the sideways drift of tires, crows and oak trees, and a dog that softly snores on a train. Parker is a poet who mends and sews the poems of healing. She helps us to understand “trauma is like that, missing pieces, filled in, stitched together like a quilt”.
– Connie Post, Author of “Floodwater” winner of the Lyrebird Awards And “Prime Meridian” finalist in the Best Book Awards and International Book Awards.
Unsettled, in her own word: unrelenting. In Down the Foggy Streets of my Mind Kelliane Parker constructs a reverse geometric proof of home. The she in the poems runs, flys, makes plans, inhabits women’s culture and makes a home out of abstracted stories and women’s culture. These poems are uneasy, fretful and they have town edges. If it’s not you it’s someone you know, and these poems are an escape map to a different sense of self.
– K. Shuck, 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco
“A melancholic poetic tapestry of memory and trauma and the feminist fight to rise above it”
– Koraly Dimitriadis, author of Just Give Me The Pills and Love and F**ck Poems
Kelliane Parker’s poems—lyrical, beautiful, often disturbing—guide the reader through extraordinary, liminal places. They drift out of the body and back to embodiment. They wander permeable borders between life and death, yet lead one back into the sun, into living gardens watched over by grandmothers who never truly die.
– Colleen McKee, author of Routine Bloodwork
In Kelliane Parker’s new book, Down the Foggy Streets of my Mind, Portal to Dissociation, we travel with her into the depths of her soul to find “the trauma underground”, where “the only escape is past fear.” We are taken on a painfully authentic journey where secrets are revealed, and past abuses are exposed through poems that are raw and uncompromising. As a survivor, Kelliane searches for a safe spot within herself, and encourages us to do the same. During her remarkable journey inward, she writes poems of despair, but also ones that honor the strength of her wise women ancestors, and the healing powers of nature. Read these amazing poems of resilience, and learn what it means to finally be able to reclaim one’s own life.
– Johanna Ely, 6th Poet Laureate of Benicia
