Trauma Decor by Joseph Hess

$14.99

“Joseph Hess’s Trauma Décor deftly melds the loss of innocence within the larger, ravaged landscapes of American culture and pastoral. From the remembrance of “evening balanced / on bike pedals,” the poet veers past Lazy Boys, Formica counters, and Flying J gas stops to solemnly remind us: “there are no green / zones to haunt, just America’s solemn décor.”

–Mark Irwin, author of Shimmer, Philip Levine Prize for Poetry

In a world stippled with B-movie spaceships and the mundane horror of late 20^th century suburbia, Joseph Hess captures the pervasive sex and violence, but also the exhaustion, heartache, and isolation, of late-stage capitalism. Smart and piercing, Trauma Décor takes us through Natural History dioramas of easy chairs staged against the news hour hum of “Vietnam casualties,” of A-bombs and David Bowie, of Godzilla and Rita Hayworth, our speaker all the while aching for intimacy in an era of marked estrangement and the precariousness of large-scale denial. “God gave me one / gland for sex and war, / and I’ve crossed and re-crossed / all their intersections,” writes Hess, and we feel each inquiry he makes deep in our gut. Trauma Décor shows us a low-key and slow-stalking Midwestern apocalypse, suitably attired in all the trappings of abundance, yet, “privately / we know we’re not who we should be.”

–Cait Weiss Orcutt, author of VALLEYSPEAK (Zone 3, 2017)

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Trauma Decor

by Joseph Hess

$14.99, paper

978-1-64662-728-8

2022

Joe Hess is from Columbus, Ohio and received his MA from Miami University and his MFA from Ashland University. You can find his work in *82 Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Into the Void, a 2017 anthology from Shabda Press entitled Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands, and in the Ohio Poetry Association’s Ekphrastic Anthology A Rustling and Waking Within.

The poems of Trauma Décor I’ve been composing for several years. Many of the poems center around one of my familiar themes: adolescent growth confronted with a weathered world in a perpetual state of adolescence itself. While the environs of the poems reveal themselves to the universal “I” searching for conclusion and inclusion, often more questions are posed than answers regarding the fractured states of familial loss, societal violence, climate-change, addiction, sexuality and history. Although these questions lack resolution, here, they are posed as realities that form an ever-present backdrop and texture that inhabits the body of the poems.

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