First published 2017
In "Alarum", Wayne Holloway-Smith detonates language across fragmented pages, tracking the violent tremors of familial trauma. Each poem operates like a shard of broken glass—sharp, reflective, dangerous. The collection moves through memory's landscape, where childhood violence and domestic rupture create seismic emotional aftershocks. Words slice and reconstruct themselves, revealing how language itself can be both wound and healing. Holloway-Smith tracks the inheritance of pain: how violence travels through blood, how silence builds pressure, how a single memory can detonate an entire emotional geography. These are not neat recollections but raw, visceral explosions of experience—each poem a compressed emotional detonation. The work refuses linear narrative, instead presenting consciousness as a jagged, recursive space where past and present collide without warning.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, poetry
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: non-linear-narrative, unreliable-narrator
Period: 21st-Century
66 pages · Paperback · Bloodaxe Books
Content warnings: domestic-violence, emotional-abuse