Description
Prevalent in many of Miriam Kramer’s eclectic poems are the intersecting pathways of grief and trauma, hope and recovery.
In her works, Miriam presents odes to getting clean followed by poems excoriating
the god of gas station bathrooms. There are lyrical introspections on the bird
figurines of her mind that are her thoughts of her late friend—and there are poems
about punching walls.
But sometimes the path to healing isn’t clear. Sometimes the next step can only be
seen in another reality. In Miriam’s myriad words, she processes what has happened
over her storied life through the lens of what has not: A dear friend not dying of
cancer; what her family photographs would look like had she died in a car accident;
that friend being sent to prison instead of overdosing.
These alternate worlds sometimes expand to briefly touch the fictional, like the time
she was relieved to be getting skinnier only to learn she was literally shrinking. Or
when she was an engine driver, until she witnessed a man lie down on the tracks in
order to die. Or when she called the poison control hotline thinking it was the
suicide hotline—not to be confused with the time she had Google Assistant help
arrange her flight to the Netherlands where assisted suicide is legal.
In these poems, Miriam demonstrates what it means to be built by the storms of our
past, our what-ifs, our lost relationships, and what it means to survive all that was
and could have been.
