[COMMITMENT]

Abstract

[COMMITMENT] is a hybrid collection of prose poems and lyric fragments that confronts experiences of trauma, institutionalization, relationship collapse, and the pursuit of beauty in the aftermath. Resisting linear narrative, the poems move through hospital corridors, courtrooms, prisons, and open fields. Themes of hunger, madness, violence, and the fragile body intersect with motifs of birds and the sacredness of the natural world, echoing the frameworks of disability poetics and the lineage of confessional literature. Informed by the aesthetics of Maggie Nelson, Bhanu Kapil, and Lyn Hejinian, this collection is both a record of survival and an unflinching confrontation with the self—a desperate, sometimes tender attempt to speak into the silence left by institutional and interpersonal erasure.