The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems [Paperback]

The Trauma Mantrasis a memoir by medical anthropologist, teacher, and writer Adrie Kusserow, who has worked with refugees and humanitarian projects in Bhutan, Nepal, India, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United States. It is a memoir of witness and humility and, ultimately, a way to critique and gain a fresh perspective on Western approaches to the self, suffering, and healing. Kusserow interrogates the way American culture prizes a psychologized individualism, the supposed fragility of the self. In relentlessly questioning the Western tribe of individualism with a hunger to bust out of such narrow confines, she hints at the importance ofwideningthe American self. As she delves into humanity’s numerous social and political ills, she does not let herself off the hook, reflecting rigorously on her own position and commitments. Kusserow travels the world in these poetic meditations, exploring the desperate fictions that “East” and “West” still cling to about each other, the stories we tell about ourselves and obsessively weave from the dominant cultural meanings that surround us.USThe Trauma Mantrasis a memoir by medical anthropologist, teacher, and writer Adrie Kusserow, who uses her international work with refugees and humanitarian projects to challenge some of the most basic Western assumptions about the self, illness, suffering, and healing.Adrie Kusserow is Professor of Anthropology at St. Michael’s College and the author ofRefuge,Hunting Down the Monk, andAmerican Individualisms.

Yusef Komunyakaa is Professor of English at New York University and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of numerous books of poetry.“In this memoir to a shaken world, Adrie Kusserow roams India, the Sudan, and Vermont, feeling out the vulnerable spots that throb and swell. Words are flocks of murmurations hidden in a refugee’s coma or in fields wild and still as the arctic blue. Trauma bullies l3v