Trauma Decor

The title poem for the chapbook, Trauma Décor, which was finalist in the Midwestern Writing Center's Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest, carries the chapbook's often-present theme of a protagonist's apocalyptic foreboding set in motion, here, by an oversaturation of terror images delivered by a 24-hour American news cycle. An acutely drawn arena of adolescent growth in a world on the brink is frequently depicted from a midwestern perspective, especially evident in the poems "Gargantuan," "Life on Mars," and "Charlton Heston is Dead," recently anthologized in Teresa Chuc's Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in our Hands. While the body of poems often pose more questions than answers regarding the self-fracturing happenings of familial loss, societal violence, climate-change, and addiction, these questions effectively function as an ever-present texture that inhabits the chapbook.

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.