Headstone is a collection of poetry that, in many ways, felt necessary to write. It began as an autoethnographic text, emerging from trauma-informed research practice, though perhaps before it knew exactly what it was becoming. At the start of my PhD, faced with the prospect of writing so many words, I simply began writing these ones.
The poems grew alongside more academic texts, arriving as a parallel language for what those texts were attempting to hold and examine. If the academic writing sought to name and analyse, these poems often lingered in what resisted straightforward articulation.
As a standalone collection, Headstone gathers reflections on the aftermath of violence, a kind of delayed protest, spoken after the moment itself has passed but while its echoes remain. It is a text reaching, perhaps gently, toward closure where closure may not otherwise have arrived. At the same time, it writes in order to remember: to preserve the traces violence leaves behind, and the strange, bruised beauty with which it can mark a life.
The poems are accompanied by photographs, many of them looking upward toward rooftops or open sky, gestures that resemble the instinct of looking away, or up, when searching for words not yet ready to be spoken.