case study of a lakefire, by TaJuan Skai

Poetry, chapbook, 44 pages, from Bottlecap Features. A body of art chiefly built on the relentless want to heal one’s inner wounds, case study of a lakefire is a poetic introspection of childhood trauma’s effect on identity, on adulthood expression, how it is inherited not only through learned experience, but through blood, and how all this, along with one bruising love, blurs one’s chaos into something educational, something seemingly impossible, something like poetry, like lake water in flames. This is a safari spanning generations of tragedy, expressed primarily through the lens of father, son, & the absence between them. Decorated with themes of addiction, queerness, spirituality, & more, case study of a lakefire is lyrically and emotionally dense, most notably in poems like “the oil spill’s prophecy” and “ibuprofen”. This is an exploration of the craft of spiral healing like no other, condensed into a breath-snatching, twenty-something pages of mountainous poetry that will