According to the back of the book, Kelsey Bigelow’s Far From Broken (2024) collection is “an expansion of her spoken word album Depression Holders and Secret Keepers” which was released in advance of the book. I haven’t heard Bigelow’s work aloud, but I can say that there were several poems which seemed so clearly meant for the stage that I could hear them in my head.
In the poems “Poetic Trigger Warning” and “My Bed Called Me Again Today,” the rhythm is so clear; because of that (and despite my reading habits being such that I read poems by sentence rather than line), I was forced to read the spaces and line breaks in these poems when I wouldn’t otherwise.
While I believe that some of these pieces were written for the page, the sounds of the words seem to have been given equal importance as the definitions of those words, which is, I think, an indication of Bigelow’s process.
Bigelow’s poems are plainspoken, straightforward and interested primarily in cutting to the quick of the issues they address. These issues include Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the various causes for the narrator’s diagnosis, dissociation, poverty, recovery (from trauma, disordered eating, self-harm) and abuse.
Each poem, no matter how despairing, reaches toward hope. This is without exception. The collection is structured as life stages, with sections titled “Introduction,” “Toning Down,” “Trigger Warnings,” “Starting Over,” “Exiting Survival Mode” and “Being Okay.”
It’s also autobiographical. (The “about” section on the back asserts that this is Bigelow’s story, so I don’t think I’m off-base with that assumption). It’s vulnerable to the point that I almost felt like a voyeur, which feels intentional. But Bigelow’s poems state, again and again, that the poet wants her audience to know that recovery, joy and tomorrow are real and theirs for the taking, that kindness and fury can and do coexist.
Besides her candor and cadence, Bigelow also experiments formally with her poetry, such as using all the space on the page; returning to a term within a poem to define it, illustrate it, reinterpret and clarify; illustrating mental conditions by changing scenes within a piece (brilliantly rendered in the poem “Noise Cancellation,” in which the reader gets a first-person perspective of dissociation), and playing with structure (“Memory” pieces use different literary elements and look more like prose than poetry).
As someone who probably could have benefitted from this book as a kid, and as someone who worked with unhoused youth for many years, I am glad this book is in the world and I regret that I cannot give it to all the young people I have known who struggle. I hope, though, that like Bigelow in her poem “Gritty Rhythm,” each of them realizes there’s always an exit. I hope each of them will say, “This is my art / and it is dangerous.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s March 2025 issue.
