Scars and Other Luxuries by Lauren Oertel

Lauren Oertel is a writer, editor, and community organizer. Her work has been published in Black Fox Literary, The Westchester Review, Gemini Magazine, The Sun Magazine, and more. She has been a winner and finalist in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction contests with The Letter Review, Writer’s Digest, Prime Number Magazine, and others. Lauren is the coauthor of the collaborative book and community project, Inside Out: A Texas Prisons Poetry Story. She lives in Austin, Texas.Instagram (@lauren_o_reads) – Facebook (@lauren.oertel.9) – Website

 

PRAISE:

 

Lauren Oertel’s poems are sentient, alive with wit and resolve. Scars & Other Luxuries shows us how the past shapes our present, “heal the wound left by the years,” but more importantly it asks what we are doing now to shape our futures, “we put in the work and built something new and look how it flourishes.” Oertel’s stellar debut will impact, fortify, and “create a new trajectory.” This collection is a reclamation map and an irresistible read!

–Junious ‘Jay’ Ward, author of Composition, and Poet Laureate of Charlotte, NC

 

For a heart to offer empathy, it must endure the wound alongside the one who has been cut. It must dare that opening. Scars & Other Luxuries is poetry taking that risk. This collection sings with longing toward life, in both the possibility and impossibility of healing––a chronically ill body, the discarded children of a broken system or memory after trauma. At times, it writhes with a Medusian choice to survive and then it tenderly reaches for “the half-dried worm…on the unbleached sidewalk” to “nudge it into the grass.” Throughout, Lauren Oertel urges us to not turn away from the pain and need of our human and non-human family, but, instead, to move bravely toward its razor edge. The inevitable scarring will only be a sign that we have remained open, as this collection does. One of life’s great luxuries.

–Brenda Marie Yeager, Poet Laureate of Lake County, CA

 

In Scars and Other Luxuries, you’ll find Lauren Oertel has crafted a body of work that moves and dances with scars and pain. These poems are evidence of surviving the patriarchy, Texas politics, and chronic illness. The poet rallies the city of Austin and reckons with privilege and the systems of power. These poems demand a collective that can  “weave a stronger tapestry to hold / all of us.” At the same time, this book wonders if we can heal together when “we lean into the blossoms.” It’s not too late because even with the “mountain laurels,” her words break through the wreckage of history with “hair that still sparkles in moonlight” and homages to poets like Franny Choi and Audre Lorde.  Fueled by her gifts for storytelling and play on form to interrogate painful histories, Oertel imagines a warmer future that glitters with the glory of possibility because together “we can create a new trajectory.”

–Sebastian Páramo, author of Portrait of Us Burning