Lexy Wren-Sillevis Undresses Your Trauma and Empowers You in Her New Poetry Book.

I am still in awe of how much this book moved me, how much it bothered and made me feel things. I suppose, it is understandable because it speaks to the raw lived experiences of many women in the world who have been called many terrible words by men.

Lexy Wren-Sillevis writes, 'Words cast spells over us. Words are powerful. In safe hands, and from the sweet mouth, they can coax you into your best self, lift your day, ease your fears. Yet in wounded, suffering, punishing hands they can suffocate and hold us under.'

The above is true to many of these words, and even worse when reading the acrostics that the author has assigned as a way to reclaim them and give them new meaning. I found them triggering in a sense that they unmade me, they undressed me and left me all exposed; which is something that the author - even without meaning to - sought to do, to force an unravelling inside you that will leave you feeling different when you reach that last page, that last word. And the illustrations were just as impactful; through the use of colour, interpreting the poems and acrostics to paint a vivid and emotional, and sometimes literal, picture that the collections hopes to convey.

You cannot heal without going through a metamorphosis first, and that is what reading WOMXN: Sticks and Stones felt like. The book is a confrontational edict, a collection of bad words made right, 'a righting of wrongs, a rewriting of the words that diminish us'.

I was motivated to dig into my own past, my own darkness and reclaim a word that has already been reclaimed by my siblings but people still use to impose their hatred on us: "Faggot".

For

As long as I've lived,

Gay has been synonymous with shame.

God forbid, I reclaimed that name.

Oh honey, this faggot is done with that.

Trust, I've done the necessary work that makes it easy for me to call myself a faggot.

In closing, to reiterate my point on rebirth and healing, Wren-Sillevis states that 'sometimes we need to be woken up, and [...] being triggered can sometimes be the beginning of a deep clearing for people.' It forces you to question why a certain word or acrostic makes you feel like that, prompting you to do the necessary work that is needed towards dealing with your feelings and your trauma.

If you have a word you'd like to reclaim, to rewrite and work through using acrostics, I'd love to hear it. This is a safe space.

I am thankful to the folks at Jonathan Ball Publishers for sending me this book, and Lexy Wren-Sillevis for writing it.