Speak. Break Free from Silence.
Breaking Through the Silence explores personal complex themes of mental health, growth, addiction, and eating disorders. Each crafted verse told in a story-like form, the author, sheds layers of her own struggles, offering a raw and honest glimpse of the delicate balance between darkness and resilience.
This collection stands as a beacon of hope for those navigating their own battles, reminding us that growth is possible even in times of adversity.
Speak. Break Free from Silence.
Breaking Through the Silence explores personal complex themes of mental health, growth, addiction, and eating disorders. Each crafted verse told in a story-like form, the author, sheds layers of her own struggles, offering a raw and honest glimpse of the delicate balance between darkness and resilience.
This collection stands as a beacon of hope for those navigating their own battles, reminding us that growth is possible even in times of adversity.
Author’s Note
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The purpose of Breaking Through the Silence: A Poetic Journey into Healing from Mental Illness is to encompass the emotional impact of disorder and recovery, and to continue sharing my story. This book acts an extension of my first book, Weightless: Healing from an Eating Disorder.
I want my poetry to connect with you, especially if you have suffered from your own mental anguish, know someone who suffers, or would like to gain a new perspective. The mental health stigma is still at large; one of the best ways to reduce a source of negative connotation is to speak about it, as difficult as it may be.
Healing is an arduous, non-linear process. My journey is not over yet; what is most important is to keep going. Writing about my personal struggles is restorative for me and has allowed me to gain incredible insight about myself. It is also very vulnerable for me to share.Â
Reading my work will not resolve any difficulties that you may be experiencing or have faced in the past. Your work must come from within, and you have all the power you need to write a different narrative for yourself. A helping hand is always welcome (and okay to lean on), of course.
It is my hope that my poetry reduces any viable or lurking thoughts that you are alone in your endeavors, and eases the path towards recovery. To provide yourself the best and safest opportunity to become your authentic self, it is advantageous to seek and identify your unique ways of healing and growing. Through suffering, hope can arise. If you are still searching for that light at the end of the tunnel, keep going!
For those who need to hear it, this is my hope for you:Â
That you can open your heart to the emotions bottled up inside, find a connection within yourself, discover that you are not alone, feel empowered to share your journey, and most importantly, heal your own wounds.Â
Everybody has a story and it deserves to be heard. Break through your silence. Give yourself compassion and cling to that hope.Â
Healing is possible; you just need to believe in it.Â
Heart left unspokenÂ
Silence has kept it broken
A shift has transpired
Its voice abandoned no more
It is time for me to heal
Tanka Poetry
All poems in this book are purposefully written in modern English Tanka verse. Tanka, also referred to as “short song,” is a Japanese short form of poetry traditionally written in 31 syllables (5-7-5-7-7). This form of poetry is meant to express emotions and intimate communication from the viewpoint of the writer; evoking deep meaning and strong feelings in the reader.
Lunn’s second book is a testament to the power of traditional form poetry as tool for healing. Lunn’s autobiographical tanka sequence exhibits the poet’s proficiency with the form both as a constructive, creative habit for the writer and as a translation of experience with mental illness to the reader.Â
Tanka, as Lunn’s contextualizing note points out, is a form that is adept at both expression of and reception of emotion. The space of the poem is a site of empathetic connection between poet-speaker and reader, and that connection can be a place of reflective transformation for the reader. But tanka also has an interesting ability to mediate the temporality of a mental illness. Especially in a sequence, the five-line poems construct a nonlinear, fragmented collage of moments, images, memories, traumas, crescendos of emotion, and gestures toward hope. While there is a narrative progression through and out of addiction and some of the darkest chapters of her journey, the tanka sequence takes on a somewhat more complex shape. It lends itself to rereading nonsequentially, allowing the reader to seek out the moments that relate to their own present.
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As Lunn makes clear in the collection’s introduction, the book itself is not an antidote to the reader’s own potential struggles with mental illness. Rather, it acts as an assurance that the reader is not alone. But Lunn does not herself enough credit for providing what might be a model for readers living with mental illness. While tanka and other traditional forms pose their challenges, writing within patterns and genre conventions can serve as a self-directed guide through periods of personal adversity. What might feel chaotic or bleak or insurmountable is rendered legible, malleable, and hopeful when written as a formal poem. The writer attains an agency over the situation that might not have been obvious before writing. Lunn’s poems do this work. And the collection does motivate the reader to find their own medium for voicing their experiences.
This edition of Breaking Through the Silence ends with a preview of Lunn’s first book, prose writings titled Weightless: Healing From an Eating Disorder. While the preview confirms shared ambitions between the two projects and while the prose is well-written, this reviewer is tempted to believe that Breaking Through the Silence is the stronger book. Artistically, rhetorically, and emotionally, Lunn’s tanka poems of resilience and growth leave a lasting impression that reveals key pathways to healing.