Dog days

This collection includes a series of poems and one short story. The work is a creative exploration of personal landscapes, both inner and outer. In particular, the poetry was inspired by working with dream material and blending it with memory, or imagined memory. Recreating the mother monster and closed worlds of communication are dominant themes in this collection; themes that address issues of emotional and physical abandonment, substance abuse and grief. The short story, "Driving Lessons", focuses on three siblings negotiating the difficulty of growing up with an alcoholic mother. This piece of fiction, like the poems, addresses a world of closed communication due to an emotional vacancy on the part of the mother.