Introduction to forthcoming book by Tanya Rakh

Soon we shall be releasing Wildflower Hell by Tanya Rakh, &, apart from editing & designing the cover, for which Rob Plath kindly gave us permission to use his awesome picture of a bee getting pollen all over her, I have written a little introductory manifesto, about the book giving a perspective on cPTSD, & nice to read for those of us with this condition. It is how Tanya handles her fire, same as me really. So I post this below, the book is coming soon enough. It will only cost $8, & I can recommend the living shit out of this book. 

EDIT. Now on sale at this link. 

An introductory publisher's manifesto

The year begins with spring, one tends to assume, because that is when the process of growth is initiated through the return of the sun, & when life burgeons. But Wildflower Hell starts in the winter, hell-set in traumatic darkness, because this is a book of healing, of resurrection, of the goddess leaving her blessings in the most unlikely places. It is a beautiful book to read, & it is a manual of sorts, if understood in a certain way.

Of course I have read these poems intently before, for I have plundered all the works of Tanya for epigraphs, a process which finally resulted in me writing, when the plundering reached its maturity, because the stars says so, the fourth book for my own beloved muse. But rereading these now, I think for the fifth or sixth time, to produce this little manifesto, I am struck afresh by the power & profundity of the words in this guidebook about how to tend & manage your cPTSD in order to produce beauty, & thereby ultimately heal yourself. The trauma does not disappear, but is incorporated productively. We start thus at wintertime, because it is de profundis that the healing begins.

This is a small book, a chapbook as they like to call them, & yet it contains so much of a life; there are worlds written in it. Don't tell me about seashells, I agree; tell us instead of the seagulls that control the skies over them, always watching out for snacks & keeping away the pigeons, some of them dressed in dove drag, all tricked out to lie to us, to make us hamsters when we could be possums & hyenas & lions & wolves.

If we sit with Tanya a while, her head full of stars, like the head of the goddess is full of fire & every universe that ever was or ever shall be, she asks us to "[p]aint with me a doorway, a gash in monotone night." This is because we create our own reality in order to exit the traumatic scar: we make our own portals, poetic & perhaps interstitial. We notice our potential lines of flight that will let us escape the rigid stratification of our role as victim. We fly to passion & intensity, as Deleuze & Guattari show us, to create a safe zone to be our animal, to become (more) beasts. We create the crack that lets the light in. The sky is cryogenic in this doorway poem, because it is part of a cold mythology of freezing things down to preserve & protect, the gently snow & the mercy of winter, freezing things to await the chance of healing, & yet it is humming there, because, under the frozen scar of trauma, life still throbs its confusion, a million healthy feelings waiting to burst out alive again.

Spring follows winter, & in spring we fuck the pain away. It does not work every time, but it can "send each recurring nightmare/ as thunder back to sky" for a while. Summer become awareness of the recurrence, it is solidified by now into always the same nightmare, love & time sleeping rigid on opposite sides of the bed, without making eye contact. But the trauma grows in the child, the ghost that you can still hear howling in the skeleton, echoing nightingale there, & maybe it she who leaves the daybroken poems there before the sun comes up. This is part of what happens in the poem "that summer", when "she" grew so much older.

The summer section represents "hell", & hell is not, pace Tanya, a desert making love to fire, that is what heaven is too. Hell is what happens in "breathe", when you apologize for everything, when you surrender yourself to shitty connections, & you breathe or you don't breathe, whatever. We are poet, the scapegoat animal that is not sacrificed, but sent out into the desert wilderness, what we sing is absolute deterritorialization & broken borders, so, as Deleuze & Guattari tell us, no signifying regime can tolerate this. They write that "[y]our only choice will be between a goat's ass and the face of the god, between sorcerers and priests" & it is the goddess we should serve, as do I, & She needs no goddam priests. The goddess is made of love & fire, she makes us out of love & fire, our souls, & the fire is our truest home.

We come to endings, to fall. & the birbs are in the first poem. They pretended to leave early, "replaced by dynamite" & "don't even get me started on the fish", Tanya tells us. The fish, they are innocent. We are the goddam fish. Mr Fish is innocent, he does not understand capitalism but he has a wife to feed, probably little fishies too. The pain he feels is the pain we felt leaving the water so many lifetimes ago. Emma & I did the same thing, it was not easy. Now the pain is the skeleton & the other bits in us as we leave the human being behind to shift into our beast becoming, as we evolve thus, but not all the new bits fit perfectly together yet.

All the newspapers catch fire and the smoke gives way to chants, marches, hashtags . . . all those little things we like to use to distract ourselves. It's always been this way, really . . . a stone isn't always a stone isn't always a memory doesn't always carry moss. For years now it's been easier to dive into molasses but what do we have to show for it? Just ask the fish . ..
(spool)

What can one say? What matters is not all these petty squabbles, this fashionable nonsense, politics & idiots, not any ideology, what matters is the healing & the ontology, it is goddess & resurrection, what aspects of us we are to choose to affirm, & to hope that She affirms & lets them return with us for all our other lifetimes.

 

In this final fall section of the book we deal with the realization of the hell we discovered during the summer section:

like I had drowned,
and the drowning
was done,
and the rain
was over.
now my heart can
die alone
again tomorrow.

and the next day.
and all the endless days we
die alone.
(you die alone)

The horror of cPTSD is its persistence. But ultimately we realize endurance, we perdure & see that

I've lived too many years
here as a dead thing
just to die now
an alias in oil slick,
(always)

All that remains is to find the one of whom one can feel that you are together & you both know it like the ocean knows, like the seagulls tell you their truth, not the murmuring lies of the goddam pigeons:

all that always was and
all the ways we'll fly again

everything we are, and
all the ways we'll fly again
(always)

So it is with pride that we at Posthuman Poetry & Prose present to you a new & restored edition of this great work by Tanya Rakh, her second book with us.