Chelsea Dingman – författare

Thaw delves into the issues at the core of a resilient family: kinship, poverty, violence, death, abuse, and grief. The poems follow the speaker, as both mother and daughter, as she travels through harsh and beautiful landscapes in Canada, Sweden, and the United States. Moving through these places, she examines how her surroundings affect her inner landscape; the natural world becomes both a place of refuge and a threat. As these themes unfold, the histories and cold truths of her family and country intertwine and impinge on her, even as she tries to outrun them.Unflinching and raw, Chelsea Dingman’s poems meander between childhood and adulthood, the experiences of being a mother and a child paralleling one another. Her investigation becomes one of body, self, woman, mother, daughter, sister, and citizen, and of what those roles mean in the contexts of family and country.

This collection of poems speaks to the grief and trauma associated with stillbirth and infertility. But more than that, these poems are concerned with how both parents deal with this trauma without letting it tear them or their relationship apart. There are threads beneath the surface of the poems that speak to the inequality in these relationships and in the male-female dynamic, whether this inequality is perceived or real. Dingman also questions the perception of reality itself when dealing with the traumatized mind.Dingman asks the difficult questions that surround child-rearing. Are the children themselves everything the parents had hoped for? Is there still something missing? She explores the invisibility of the mother after she has children, as well as what a woman is willing to sacrifice in terms of body, country, and relationship. Set against changing political climates in Florida, Canada, and Denmark, these poems navigate the geopolitical differences that influence the experience of parenting.

Thaw delves into the issues at the core of a resilient family: kinship, poverty, violence, death, abuse, and grief. The poems follow the speaker, as both mother and daughter, as she travels through harsh and beautiful landscapes in Canada, Sweden, and the United States. Moving through these places, she examines how her surroundings affect her inner landscape; the natural world becomes both a place of refuge and a threat. As these themes unfold, the histories and cold truths of her family and country intertwine and impinge on her, even as she tries to outrun them.Unflinching and raw, Chelsea Dingman’s poems meander between childhood and adulthood, the experiences of being a mother and a child paralleling one another. Her investigation becomes one of body, self, woman, mother, daughter, sister, and citizen, and of what those roles mean in the contexts of family and country.