Karen Wanagre Leonard

Going unarmed into the wail

“M/other, I’m here. I’m other. I’m all the us I can carry. I’m all the us I can remember. I’m the part of you that is proof of this genocide. We/re part of the forest that wasn’t supposed to survive.”

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?