Birth Trauma and Violence

Lucille Clifton’s “the lost baby poem” captures the pain of potential life lost. How do we make sense of violent beginnings?

Dorothy Allison and Toni Morrison reconstruct interiority from historical violence. When is birth itself implicated in coercion and terror? ZZ Packer’s “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” asks what it means to arrive—at adulthood, at an institution, at selfhood—under conditions of grief.

Christina Sharpe’s concept of “wake work” illuminates how we live in the aftermath of catastrophe. How does Packer render refusal as survival strategy?