Kelsey Bigelow learns to stand in her power in her collection "Far From Broken"
A review of the Des Moines poet's upcoming release
When you spend your life folding into yourself to stay clear of others’ volatility, it can feel unnerving to suddenly stretch your limbs, walk where you please, feel your heart beat for yourself for the first time.
Kelsey Bigelow has contorted herself for many years. She’s hidden within her pain, put on a facade as the person her family needed to keep them tethered to some sense of normalcy with no effort on their own part. But her 30s have revealed to her that truth makes a life more livable, no matter the discomfort.
Kelsey’s newest poetry collection, “Far From Broken,” out April 4th, explores how she navigated those darker parts of her childhood and young adulthood from the other side, where she stands not as someone fully healed but as someone who is learning to live with her childhood PTSD and is finally at peace with the variant nature of healing.
Pre-order Far From Broken by Kelsey Bigelow, out April 4th.
This collection follows the story of Kelsey’s turbulent upbringing into her healing journey as an adult. Early on, we read a memory written in prose of Kelsey’s mom taking her, at age 4, to get her ear’s pierced without her dad’s knowledge. This sets us up for a narrative of Kelsey being forced to shoulder the poor choices made by the adults in her life. A mother she had to parent, who brought anger into their home through a stepfather who ingrained in Kelsey her fallibility as a woman. A father who couldn’t see the pain she was hiding. Physically violent and angry brothers who chose lives of crime and addiction.
A life of living as what she calls “the checklist child,” the child who did everything right to avoid causing any more conflict in their family no matter how much she suffered from depression and self harm when no one was paying attention to her. (I am the child you don’t have to worry about / Translation: I am the child you don’t think about)
This collection is masterful at balancing an exploration of the very real pain caused to Kelsey by people meant to protect her with a tender voice that still believes deeply in the power of love and healing. She writes about the beautiful memories she had playing at the park with her brothers at age 5, an idyllic scene of childhood joy, before landing a gut punch by telling us this is the last memory she has where she truly felt like a child. She later goes back to the day her mother died, the second chance she wishes she could give her brother in hopes he’d make a different choice than leaving their mother’s bedside to buy drugs. Kelsey knows her brother is hurting and lost, but when her last good memory of being a child is from age 5, she can no longer afford to put his healing before her own. “I want the path I take/more than I want a better one for him,” she writes.
Through beautifully tragic metaphor (her poem “A poem in which my emotions are at the DMV and I am the clerk” personifies emotions in such a poignant way that I had to get up and walk around after I read it) and a narrative voice that continues to find its bravery, Kelsey offers a look into what it took for her to believe that her life was not a predestined path. She has friends who show up for her in the ways young Kelsey needed, finds solace in writing poetry from a young age. She starts caring for herself before anyone else. Breath is referenced often—the restorative cleanse of deep breathing, the calming sensations that stabilize her in a world she has only recently began believing could feel stable.
“3, 2, let out my breath” she says to herself frequently in difficult conversations. Other times, the lack of breath overtakes her when she feels a keen sense of uncontrol. “Days like this make me wish praying worked for me/I would beg for my air back.” It’s a reminder of how trauma lives in our bodies, sucking our breath and fighting for every inch of space it can find.
Today, Kelsey facilitates workshops that use storytelling as a means for participants to understand their own mental health stories. This collection is Kelsey putting these workshops into action. Understanding the ways people let her down during her formative years. The ways she was taught to contort herself at the expense of her safety. The pain that brewed for years that no one looked close enough to see.
But also the capability we have to care for the wounds that no one else tended to. How we can overcome the fear of the non-linear nature of healing. How we, like Kelsey, can finally stand in our power no matter how long we felt powerless.
Pre-order Far From Broken by Kelsey Bigelow, out April 4th.
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