Trouble Department

Description

This book is speaking from impossible betrayal and grief, speaking from inside the wound, but speaking despite. Lawson writes, “The body struggles to make sense of such a condition” and Rot Contracts embodies that struggle. – Steven Dunn, author of Water & Power

The legal contract is a record of our promises to one another. But who holds us accountable for the agreements that never get written down? What happens when those agreements include our family bonds themselves?

In this little book of absolutely brutal poems, Jessica Lawson wraps up family, parenthood, grief, and abandonment in a narrative that renders the experience of family separation both catastrophic and intimate. Through poems written as a series of cold, formal legal documents, this chapbook follows a mother watching her children be disowned by their father. It’s a book that asks how we tally the emotional bill in the aftermath of abandonment, and what paternal ghosts remain in the wake of this loss. Where does family go when family goes?