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Going Unarmed Into the Wail

by Karen Wangare Leonard

Going Unarmed Into the Wail is an intense, intimate chapbook that wrestles with what it is to be a product of the adoption-industrial complex. With rich visuals, the poems in this chapbook create space that leaves room to interrogate relationships with historic and present systemic violence, queerness, disability, and homecoming. In a society that heavily celebrates adoption, this bravely vulnerable collection pays tender attention to what makes and breaks a family, acutely aware that not everyone survives the persistent grief of displacement.

This work offers readers of all backgrounds a chance to be honest about how we got here. For those directly impacted by family regulation, surveillance, policing, and adoption, this writing is a refuge that disrupts the isolation these exploitative systems intend.

Can there be an alternative way forward?

Adoptee Author: Karen Wangare Leonard

Publication Year: 2024


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Available to purchase from the publisher We Are Holding This