RECURRENT - Digital

In RECURRENT, Darla Mottram tells a story of familial abandonment, addiction, sexual abuse, violence, loss, and generational influence through her lyrical poetry, a handful of black-and-white family photographs, notes from foster-care workers, and the full text of a letter that Mottram, age seven, wrote to her mother, "whereabouts unknown, which was never delivered." Calling RECURRENT a story is imprecise, but suggests the book's central struggles with time, loss, and meaning-making. Mottram explicitly resists many of the tropes associated with mourning, maintaining that I want to / honor / what's broken / no: silver linings, phoenix rising / from ashes, lemons turned lemonade / no recovery narrative / the poem fails / to make understandable / what isn't—I don't want to fix it / I just want to hold it. This book grabbed me: out of trauma and loneliness, Mottram has created a work of insight, beauty, and humanity.

—Michele Glazer, author of Fretwork and On Tact, and the Made Up World