I, Divided by Chelsea Dingman (LSU Press) – Reviewed by Vikki C.

A powerful and intimate exploration into the violence of loss within the female experience set against motifs of climate change, disease and generational trauma, I, Divided speaks of ongoing chaos and fracturing, where psychological patterns elide into vast philosophical concerns. 

Human grief is examined through an animalistic and climatic lens where its findings are both unforgiving and tender at once. In this journey, the poet contends relentlessly with difficult themes of death, suicide, cancer and economic hardship. Yet, for the speaker, the pain endured becomes both a study and a vessel that carries its bearer across unknowable thresholds with remarkable grace. 

Here, pain is also a living construct caught in a liminality between nature and human: “The pain, / a garden of weeds that sprouts / into masses through my ribs. / For everything this body has given me, it takes & takes: a yield of innocent / lives. A promise to wake.” 

And we learn this awakening is enacted in the dark, in the act of surviving repeatedly through social and humanitarian instability, where the wounded female body is rendered into a site of determination and blessing. “To goddess the cells”...”To woman this acre of history.”...”To halo the swelling.” 

This collection holds life at its outer reaches where science touches the membrane of complex systems. Where, like the butterfly effect of chaos theory itself, grief manifests in magnitudes only a poet can envision. It is here too that such fractaled repetition, sometimes by miracle, breaks through past design—realising a new order towards self-healing.  

I, Divided is published by LSU Press and is available on Amazon.