7 Experimental Books That Reimagine How Trauma Is Told

Trauma does not recollect to us whole. Memory is already a ghost of our experience, haunting us from inside our minds and bodies. Put 10 people in a room with a blackbird for an hour and you’ll get at least 13 different descriptions and perspectives. Put 10 people in a room with a blackbird during a natural disaster and most stories are no longer about the blackbird. This is why I’m drawn to experimental texts that create unique formal registers to navigate traumatic moments: works in which form harnesses, mirrors, and refracts trauma, conveying the content’s physical, sensorial, and historical fractures in a way linear narrative cannot. Fracture and experiment can capture not only the breathless, disconnected experience of trauma but physically enact it in the text itself: trauma as cyclone, as body under erasure, shaping not only how we remember these moments but how we put them back together, often in pieces.

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