Raymond Souster Award nominee. Finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award. In 2012, poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner precipitously lost feeling in, and use of, her left side. The mini-stroke passed quickly but was symptomatic of something larger: a tear in the lining of an artery known as the tunica intima. This long-poem memoir tracks the author's experiences with un/wellness and un/re-familiarity with herself. Shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, Trauma Head disturbs and disorders language and syntax to reconcile appearance with experience.

Advance Praise for Trauma Head:

"Elee Kraljii Gardiner's Trauma Head is a quicksilvered mirror-a startling and exquisite sequence of poems. The ‘unspeakable' reflected is intensely fierce and sublimely sensual. Difficult, devastating, and meticulously crafted, this work is a rewarding chronicle of persistence through the trauma of recovery and return. Speech and soma are disrupted, shattered, unsheathed and reshaped-and they shimmer with Kraljii Gardiner's luminous strength and control."

- Sandra Ridley, author of Silvija (2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Finalist)

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is the author of serpentine loop (Anvil Press, 2016) and the co-editor with John Asfour of V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012). She is the founder and creative mentor of Thursdays Writing Collective, a non-profit organization of Downtown Eastside writers, and editor and publisher of eight of its anthologies. www.eleekg.com

Elee Kraljii Gardiner's profile page