At the end of each semester, low-residency creative writing graduate students are often required to review their experience. Katie Dozier left Forest Grove, Oregon, during her second residency, and now submits the review many would rather she not have written.
Dozier braids quotes, emails, and a Title IX document alongside more traditional poetry, including haibun and contemporary haiku.
Residency Review is a memoir in verse that confronts institutional silence, sexual assault, disability, motherhood, and the failure of a community to listen. Fierce, unsparing, and achingly intimate, it makes the case that poetry is the only instrument precise enough to measure what official language refuses to say.
You must write yourself over and over
until you remember: this is your only life.
-from What to Do If You're Trapped
Inside a Paper Bag
