These Domestic Incidences by Lara Adams Gaydos

Please, somebody, teach me how to forget. So ends one of the remarkable poems in These Domestic Incidences. Its author, Lara Adams Gaydos, knows that the true work of a poet, no matter how she might wish otherwise, is to remember, but to do so in such a way that one’s private encounter with trauma speaks to the larger human condition. This book, built out of the author’s experience of having been the “lead story” on the nightly news – after providing refuge to two wounded young children fleeing their deranged father – reminds us all how our worlds can be turned upside down in a moment we “thought was so safe.” The book’s title captures the truth that we are all at risk. But These Domestic Incidences is more than just an instructional manual on how to live with the after-shock of trauma. It is an exploration of memory and how memory “secures the scene,” how the poet’s craft – that attention and care words ask of the poet and her readers – can extend and deepen our sensibilities so that we might live in difficult times.
–Christopher Bursk, author of Places of Comfort, Places of Justice

These Domestic Incidences by Lara Adams Gaydos is a stunning and sometimes brutally honest look at violence: “Every so often, you see in the local news / a troubling story of how someone got too close / to a den, or somehow provoked a lethal predator / you didn’t even know lived right here / in this place you thought was so safe.”  The poems tell the story of those who survive after the trauma, and how they attempt to live life adjusting to that trauma—even little things such as opening Christmas gifts can bring back those memories, and one must adjust to the daily lives  “screaming the good kind of screams / the kind you don’t have to worry about, / the kind you could listen to all day.”

–Leah Maines, best-selling, award-winning author, editor and actor