In Living in the Abyss, Katrina Jirik (Ph.D.) bravely does what the best poets do: lay bare hard truths. The speaker observes: "trauma's language of words / is so vastly different/ that it is like a language all its own/ a language you have been taught / in excruciating detail." Abyss is a collection where careful and surprising observations reveal deep truths about living with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD). As the poet, Forrest Gander observes: "The political begins in intimacy." Jirik's intimate poems of trauma and resilience are ultimately poems of survival that are social, political, and deeply personal. "So you exist within the shimmer / moving hesitantly in the incomprehensible world." What a gift to read Abyss, and to be with Jirik's speaker, in this incomprehensible world.

-Kathryn Savage writes and teaches poetry and creative nonfiction.
http: //www.kathrynsavage.com/

This volume's poetry is a tribute not only to the poet's ability to recover from severe developmental trauma, but to share with the rest of us descriptions of an internal landscape that is beyond most of our imaginations. In doing so, she has given us priceless gifts: for the theorist and researcher, a unique view of the affective and cognitive results of severe early trauma; for the clinician, an invaluable invitation to greater insight and understanding of their patient's internal reality; and to the lay reader, the ability to enter hell and ultimately ascend again.

-Mary Kelleher, Ph.D., LMFT, is a psychotherapist trained in the treatment of trauma. http: //www.marykelleherlmft.com

Jirik's poetry is all-encompassing. It ranges from the dark to the comedic to the light and straight to your soul. The collection stops you in your tracks, beckoning a reckoning with trauma, survivorship, and the implicit fallacies of society's normative approach to these. It questions how the world seems to move on while you are stopped in your tracks, with contradictions of connection versus loneliness, introspection versus outwardness, and internal versus external. A must-read for all seekers and questioners.

-Molly Joyce is a composer and performer whose work focuses on disability as a creative source. www.mollyjoyce.com