Overview

"Lindsay Soberano Wilson's second full-length book of poems, Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues: Poems For Healing, finds peace in painful, messy, shameful parts of life unearthed at inconvenient times. With poems about suicide, sexual assault, addiction, intergenerational trauma, domestic violence, Toronto 90s rave culture, and a pandemic, Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues finds light in the darkness. The visual and lyrical poems, shed light on hard truths while inspiring readers to ""Dance Through the Dark"" to find ""Glimmers,"" instead of tripping on triggers like the poem, ""I Tripped on a Wound Today"" about being a third-generation Holocaust survivor. As the creator of Put It To Rest, a mental health literary online hub, Lindsay believes in putting painful stories to rest by writing them out to let them go: Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues weaves in and out of childhood, coming of age, and adulthood on a healing journey to put the past behind, embrace the present, and trust the future. In the opening poem, ""I Call This Trauma"", the narrator discovers that untying ""knots"" to fix everything is fruitless, eventually turning to acceptance in ""Hope, Are You There?"" Breaking Up With The Cobalt Blues culminates in a heroic call to action to break up with victimhood to embrace trauma healing reflected in the beauty of the ""northern lights."" Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues takes readers on a journey from victimization to becoming self-empowered curators of life, despite the freefall from grace into everyday beauty like being open to receiving ""Glimmers."" So just maybe one can never really break up with the ""blues"" but there's no reason why the blues can't morph into a softer hue that's part of life rather than a defining moment. Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues is about making peace with grief and not letting the past define you, but recreating a future that accepts that pain is a part of life, allowing growth. The concluding poem ""Stay Gold"" is a tribute to the friends we've lost too soon, accepting that only the good die young."

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9781962374255

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Reviews

"The loss of a loved one through suicide rips one's entire life apart, almost. Lindsay Soberano Wilson deals with that loss unflinchingly in these poems. From pain, she wrought beauty, from chaos and despair an affirmation of self, as a human being, a woman, a poet. Poetry is ""something to lose yourself in and find yourself in."" Cobalt Blues constitutes a journey that Soberano Wilson makes ours through her resilience and love of words. She is a survivor: ultimately her book celebrates being here like in the poem ""When I Climb Back Out of the Darkness."" Breaking Up with the Cobalt Blues is the beacon of light. Peter Mladinic, author of House Sitting and The Homesick Mortician. As a Member of the Feminist Caucus via the League of Canadian Poets Lindsay embodies the fraught contraries of a woman's lived experience, as mother, daughter, granddaughter, so eloquently voiced in these poems. She ennobles a strength of character and commitment so essential to overcoming intergenerational trauma and consequential familial suffering, by fashioning well-wrought gifts of insight and intuition. As a shapeshifter, this poet limns a dazzling landscape of premonitions and obsessive thoughts, each word as from an impressionistic painting technique called ""pointillism"" when dashes of color are applied in distinct patterns to form an image. While the invention of ""cobalt blue"" allowed much of the explosive creativity that we see in impressionist and post-impressionist painting, the poet uses the plural to riff on its emotive and musical significance. As a literary artist, she reveals in her newfound freedom of choice, extending her truth-telling abilities beyond a depressive dystopian worldview. The poet as scapegoat nevertheless occupies a sacred, eternal space. She ""pens"" what we recognize as the outward boundaries which arise from an epistemology based on heightened bodily impressions transmuted into art. Assigning blame for reported past assignations simply affords due responsibility, in ""How I Became a Poet."" ""Queen of the Sabbath"" (and the entity) is the personification of the Jewish day of rest, Saturday. An allusion that she still possesses a prominent position in Judaic mythology is illustrative of tradition and poetic context. The poet speaks of disenchantment in cyber space alongside dreams of monsters and ugly Medusa head. ""Release me from a litany of sorrows"" is a rallying cry. ""But the world's handprints are still on me."" What remains is ""a muse in a cage."" As muse she envies ""[Leonard] Cohen's Lover, like Suzanne because she's tameless and irresistible..."" In ""How to Live"" the advice is: 1. Be Too Much (because more is more) and 2. Love out loud. Anne Burke Literary Editor of The Prairie Journal"

Author Information

"Lindsay Soberano Wilson is a mom, teacher, internationally published author, and creator of Put It To Rest, a mental health literary hub. Her debut poetry collection Hoods of Motherhood: A Collection of Poems (Prolific Pulse Press, 2023) reflects on Soberano Wilson'sportrayal of becoming a mother. Her poem, from this collection, ""The Japanese Red Maple"" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her work was recently nominated for the Best of the Net. Born in Toronto, Canada, Lindsay is the granddaughter of Spanish Moroccan immigrants and Romanian Holocaust survivors. Her chapbook Casa de mi Corazon: A Travel Journal of Poetry and Memoir (Poetica Publishing, 2021) explores how her sense of community, Canadian Jewish identity, and home was shaped by travel. Lindsay graduated with an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and English from Concordia University and earned a Master of Arts degree in English and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Toronto. Recent publications include Jewish Women of Words, Fine Lines Literary Journal, Fevers of the Mind, Avalanches in Poetry III: Poetry, Writings & Art Inspired by Leonard Cohen, Spillwords Press, Cadence, Prolific Pulsations and Proof of Life anthology in honour of 10-7. In 2023, she earned a scholarship for teachers from the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem to The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel. Lindsay is a member of the Feminist Caucus via The League of Canadian Poets where she and fellow poets amplify women's voices. She is writing a memoir about being a third-generation Holocaust survivor."

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