WILD EMBRACE is a collection of poetry that explores the themes of abuse, survival, and fragility. The speaker of these poems, older and distanced from the abuse, asks what it means to be a survivor, and explores our obligation of compassion that, as human beings, we owe one another. While much of the work in this collection is rooted in personal experience, it is not intended to be read as memoir or autobiography. Many of these poems may have begun as lived experience, but between memory, the transcription of memory, and their final form on the printed page, they have been run through a variety of embellishment, artistic license, and shifting narrative forms. The poems in this collection attempt to capture a heightened emotional truth that can’t be attained by mere reporting of fact. WILD EMBRACE sifts through the ashes of suffering and loss, and constructs a mythology as personal as it is collective.