The Wounded Line
University of New Mexico Press, 2025
In this accessible and inspiring guide, acclaimed writer Jehanne Dubrow draws on how the study of trauma has defined both her creative work and her teaching. The Wounded Line, the first craft-based writing book of its kind, is grounded not only in research but also in heart, in the belief that even our deepest hurts can find a lyric form. Leading poets through a series of practical approaches to representing pain on the page, Dubrow provides readers with narrative techniques, rhetorical structures, and formal strategies that can be applied to any trauma, from the global and the historical to the intimate and the personal. The Wounded Line encourages poets at all stages to address the difficult, discomfiting questions that ache within each of us.
Deeply engaged in poetry, history, and trauma theory, The Wounded Line is for anyone who wants to understand that complex intersection of pain, memory, and art. Part meditation on the way trauma works in the mind (as nightmare, as inhibition, as creative force) and part resource for writers who would learn to transform individual and generational trauma into poetry, this book should be in every teacher’s and every poet’s library. Dubrow writes with clarity, sensitivity and intelligence, shining a bright light across very difficult terrain.
– Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears
What a moving and friendly book, with such perfect touches of detailed professional expertise of a wonderful teacher and talented and passionate poet! I loved how this book guides without being imposing, how it opens the door without overwhelming, how it focuses on craft via love for craft. Here is a book that can be a friend, a book that you can take on the journey with you, and then share with someone in your life who, too, will benefit from such a journey. It is the kind of text well worth sharing, for here craft and urgency of being come hand in hand. A terrific book.
– Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
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Related Links
- Review in Jewish Book Council
- Review in Collateral
- Interview in Foreword
- Interview in Chloe Yelena Miller’s Substack
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