1
it is deep here
it is tear dropped.
it is cobalt cold.
it is polka dot hot.
I spy a spearhead.
it is frightening fraught.
it is only geology.
it is only tin antimony
it is a tin and bitter taste.
it is clouded distance as seen in the pewter blue cold.
it is dark clouded.
it is where it is a cloud of burned clay.
2
it is light typing on the mountain in the form of four frogs.
it is only a fulfilling moon.
it is obsolete light.
3
it is rolling the ball over the waves.
it is close and slowing.
it is slow close.
it is sinking.
it is beside the circular island holding the pewter mountain time.
it is waving virtuous.
it is low wishes washing away.
4
it is stacks and ozone tonight.
it is turpentine inside the solution
it is silicate layers.
it is depositing carbon on an engine.
it is carbon carbon bonding.
it is bound to sand.
5
it is seen not knowing
it is knowing that there is no sound for my head hitting the grey and yellow ground.
it is obsolete bells
it is obsolete as a latched door.
it is silent to let sight alone.
6
it is a numb boundary on sunday.
it is skies and skeletons.
it is dull like a lack of interest standing.
it is the laying down inside the grey house with the grey trim swimming in lichen and pollination
stains.
it is grey lady one through four threading the string instrument.
it is big dirty horse blanket
it is heavy overwhelming the linen the ocean knows well.
it is moaning again.
it is men in the off hours
it is walking backward wearing flip-flops in the close cold.
it is carrying as a total load the heavy wait of years.
it is migraines also grown as sodium chloride inside the wound.
it is rewinding the video in the yellow room.
it is eyes and pinwheels all the way down.
7
it is over-thinking bismuth
it is skin flickering.
it is going to be green and skin.
it is seeking the rain-maker to know water vapour will overwhelm.
it is just timing a lustrous metalloid.
it is hungry to have the teeth close cold on the nickel linking itself to the future.
it is the history of skin
then teeth
then the sky
it is first cut for the love of hair and skin.
it is teeth then night.
it is a penny for the teeth thinking.
it is lettering into an opening against time.
is it taking the ache inside?
1
it is deep here
it is tear dropped.
it is cobalt cold.
it is polka dot hot.
I spy a spearhead.
it is frightening fraught.
it is only geology.
it is only tin antimony
it is a tin and bitter taste.
it is clouded distance as seen in the pewter blue cold.
it is dark clouded.
it is where it is a cloud of burned clay.
2
it is light typing on the mountain in the form of four frogs.
it is only a fulfilling moon.
it is obsolete light.
3
it is rolling the ball over the waves.
it is close and slowing.
it is slow close.
it is sinking.
it is beside the circular island holding the pewter mountain time.
it is waving virtuous.
it is low wishes washing away.
4
it is stacks and ozone tonight.
it is turpentine inside the solution
it is silicate layers.
it is depositing carbon on an engine.
it is carbon carbon bonding.
it is bound to sand.
5
it is seen not knowing
it is knowing that there is no sound for my head hitting the grey and yellow ground.
it is obsolete bells
it is obsolete as a latched door.
it is silent to let sight alone.
6
it is a numb boundary on sunday.
it is skies and skeletons.
it is dull like a lack of interest standing.
it is the laying down inside the grey house with the grey trim swimming in lichen and pollination
stains.
it is grey lady one through four threading the string instrument.
it is big dirty horse blanket
it is heavy overwhelming the linen the ocean knows well.
it is moaning again.
it is men in the off hours
it is walking backward wearing flip-flops in the close cold.
it is carrying as a total load the heavy wait of years.
it is migraines also grown as sodium chloride inside the wound.
it is rewinding the video in the yellow room.
it is eyes and pinwheels all the way down.
7
it is over-thinking bismuth
it is skin flickering.
it is going to be green and skin.
it is seeking the rain-maker to know water vapour will overwhelm.
it is just timing a lustrous metalloid.
it is hungry to have the teeth close cold on the nickel linking itself to the future.
it is the history of skin
then teeth
then the sky
it is first cut for the love of hair and skin.
it is teeth then night.
it is a penny for the teeth thinking.
it is lettering into an opening against time.
is it taking the ache inside?
A Note on Traumatism...
What is the matter with me? My eighth poetry collection is an inquiry into the pathology and psychology of being wounded deeply. I wanted to consider language as material in line with Gertrude Stein and material as language in line with Patrick Cosgrove.
Gertrude Stein utilizes language as the material of mental states. She is interested in getting to the ways words move us to behave the way we do by means of association and syntax. She writes:
After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there. (Stein p.4)
Stein uses three repeats: everybody, inside themselves, really in order to illustrate how the writing life is divided. The first country is real in the sense it is a noun and the second country is really there in the sense it is a description a power to form internal images. The life of the mind inside themselves is description.
I found myself part archeologist in the writing Traumatism I was describing artifacts from my life. These objects might be real or imagined, but my point is that writing about them made them really there. The prose poem form gives the pages of the book the appearance of a field journal with neat dedicated entries. There are repeated references to artifacts like the 'clouded could', because they require more context than one poem offer. There is really excavation happening here. There is a line between interpretation and its opposite that is navigated over the course of the collection. The poems move forward and backward in time in order to give interpretation to my mental states and the images they produced.
Language as material lies at the heart of Patrick Cosgrove's work in that he elegantly reversed the simile most experimental work takes as a rule. His work is an inquiry into the nature of language and material that illuminates both then yields novel poems and performances. He animates objects in the act of interpretation. His long time collaborator, Richard Marshall, writes of Cosgrove that he:
has constructed a world in which the ordinary guarantees of making do not hold. Someone has carefully arranged materials so that desire, use, and interpretation circulate without resolution. (Marshall)
He takes objects that are already made and reimagines their way of working in the world. The meaning we thought we knew becomes the vehicle for a simile remaking the very rules of the world in which we live for the tenor. The word as as in a simile comes from the word also, as low, also allow sow, all sow whether or not the reader thinks the pair are alike things. The word as rejects binary logic and this gives the observer a feeling of unease or uncertainty in this situation.
There is an interplay with real and material that is unpredictable. Cosgrove's work offers a restating of Stein's 'it is not real but it is really there' through his utilization of psychology. He writes:
I have become more aware of connections I feel my performances have with the theories and work of neuroscientists, psychologists and therapists such as Antonio Damasio, Bessel van der Kolk, Dan Hughes and Margot Sutherland. Each in their own way is concerned with emotions and the embodied nature of consciousness. I see the performances as an opportunity to put body, emotion and senses upfront. (Cosgrove)
Cosgrove's performances use material as language to contextualize the traumatic past. The utilization of matter instead of words makes for a immediate appeal to the senses and fully embodies the ways in which trauma impacts someone. This is also a comment on the temporal nature of trauma, that it is no longer real in the present tense, but it is really embodied there.
I deployed language as material to try my own version of it is not real but it is really there by means of a series of allusions to trauma. The subject of every sentence in the collection is the ominous third person that is not a person appears as it to begin every sentence save for questions where it appears as the second word. The repeated reference is intended to lend echoing quality when read aloud to soften the feelings of the reader by so often referring to the unnamed ominous. There is no specific event or villain or even obvious victim, instead there is a fog of feeling. This opacity makes it possible for the poems to focus on the ways in which trauma proceeds and recedes through the mind. The greater the length of the sentence, the further the sentence carries the reader away from the name and knowing and in this way they are living the experience of Traumatism as they move through the collection of poems describing the same. I am following Stein in the way in which she moved toward using language as material to explore mental states from her scientific background toward a literary future.
Traumatism is about movement. The poems illuminate the ways in which reflection and refraction move one toward healing. These interactions are not unlike composing poetry. Fowler writes: poetry in whatever its form is just a set of small decisions accrued. (Cosgrovia) He is referring to the manner in which Cosgrove assembles his poems utilizing material as language. He reminds the audience of the very materiality of life and the proliferation of objects that we use and reject by means of rescuing what is discarded and bringing it to the stage or page. His performances animate objects in the service of building sculptures. This work goes far beyond a reversal of foreground and background to reveal a deep interest in what is wasted or laid to waste and discarded in human life. He defines a world by what it has decided to discard. He is revisiting those decisions to turn objects into waste. He reminds us, his audience, of the very materiality of life and the proliferation of objects that we use and reject. Do we use and reject people in our lives in the same manner? His inquiry into the accumulation of a human lifetime is what makes his poetry so compelling.
I took this interest in the accumulation of a lifetime and desire to explore waste into the language of Traumatism. The poems employ multiple inside jokes. For example, the ocean is my little sister, because her name is Meredith; this was shortened to Mere in school and pronounced the way the French say sea not the way the Americans slur mirror. She took care of me after my surgery and cancer scare and I decided she deserved a impressive title, so she became the ocean. Naturally, her daughter became the mackerel in my poems and if you ought to be able to guess her name with this information. This is to say that I let lines of association lengthen other lines of association to accumulate to make the language of the poems internally coherent.
To repeat it is is to turn the meaning of trauma into a metaphor that is constantly turning around to look behind itself for the future. Traumatism might be best understood as a book seeking to understand itself in every sentence the meaning of the title is unraveled a little further. It is a book about curiosity for better or worse. What I took from Cosgrove in relation to form was a desire to animate objects or share the animated objects inside my mind with the reader. What I took from Stein was a belief in the power of language to reveal the vagaries of our mental states to us or language as mental states.
Works Cited:
Cosgrove, Patrick, 'Poem Brut' Serendip Studio (2019) <https://serendipstudio.org/oneworld/poem-brut/patrick-cosgrove>
Fowler, SJ, 'Essay' Cosgrovia (steel incisors: visual poetry with teeth 2025)
Lewis, Julia Rose, 'Traumatism' (Knives Forks Spoons Press 1 August 2026) <https://www.amazon.com/Traumatism-Julia-Rose-Lewis/dp/1916590217/>
Lewis, Julia Rose and Newman, Alec, and Kratz, Martin, 'Two Ways of Reading,' European Poetry Festival Manchester Camarade, 3rd October 2026 <https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/manchester26>
Marshall, Richard, 'Assembling the Erotics of Dread', 3:16am, 2026 <https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/cosgrovia-assembling-the-erotics-of-dread>
Stein, Gertrude, Paris France (Penguin Archive 17 April 2025)
Julia Rose Lewis is a writer and her most recent poetry collection is Traumatism (KFS 2026). She and Wilfred Franklin wrote together the essay collection, Overly Verbal Ape: Studies in the work of SJ Fowler (KFS). She has authored the poetry collections: Phenomenology of the Feral (KFS 2017), High Erratic Ecology (KFS 2020), The Hen Wife (Contraband 2020), Misuse (KFS 2024). She and Nathan Hyland Walker co-authored The Velvet Protocol (KFS 2022). She and Paul Hawkins co-authored the visual poetry collection Postcards From Mental States (Hesterglock Press 2023). She has published ten pamphlets, the most recent of which is Still Life (Storybox Collective 2025).
Alec Newman is a poet, publisher and designer, and the founder of Knives Forks and Spoons Press, an independent UK publisher established in 2010. Dedicated to experimental, avant-garde and late modernist writing, the press has developed an international catalogue of poetry and innovative literary projects. Newman combines editorial practice with book design, typography and digital publishing, exploring the relationship between language, visual form and the material book. His work champions unconventional voices and approaches to literature, extending the reach of experimental writing through independent publishing, international distribution and digital media.