Cirrus@Austlit

'Published less than a year apart, Meera Atkinson’s two new books make a profound and original contribution to the study of trauma in the humanities and creative writing practice, as well as the wider public conversation about its rippling effects upon lives and across generations. Traumata (UQP 2018) and The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma (Bloomsbury 2017) are very different works, one a creative non-fiction account of growing up and living with trauma and the other an academic inquiry into the literary poetics of trauma transmitted from one generation to another. Yet the two books traverse similar terrain in search of answers to similar questions: how does trauma move from one body to another and across time? How is it shaped and changed by the actions of living, the structures of oppression within which it operates and the slow, arduous efforts of survivors to recover? How might language bring forth that most resistant of experiences, the traumatic?'  (Introduction)