Guardrail

Abstract

Guardrail is a collection of poems that aim to explore the mental landscape of a person who has lost their God and yearns for the divine amidst their gradual development of a mental disorder. Told in a single section, we journey through the speaker’s tenderness, obsessions, and small sorrows both present and past. The collection takes love, intergenerational trauma, and loss as its central themes, and though we are introduced to various relationships throughout, return continuously to the central bond between that of mother and daughter. These poems hope to capture moments, both fleeting and monumental, on the journey back to self, back to God, back to love.