HEAL! Simone Kaho
Buy your copy of HEAL! by Simone Kaho.
Released September 16, 2022.
Buy your copy of HEAL! by Simone Kaho.
Released September 16, 2022.
Buy your copy of HEAL! by Simone Kaho.
Released September 16, 2022.
Content warning: This book involves discussion of sexual violence, assault, trauma, PTSD and self-harm.
HEAL! is Tongan-Pākehā author Simone Kaho’s second poetry book. It’s not a self-care manual. HEAL! close tracks multiple points of trauma, sexual violence, violation of boundaries in the workplace, at community service, as a child, and ever-present colonial dominance. How it infiltrates and seeps into everything, so it’s imperceptible when it started, and if you look closely enough, it’s not clear what’s self and what’s a reaction to trauma.
HEAL! comes from a survivor who refuses to be quiet. It is harrowing at times, it laughs at its own pain and the people who caused it, with the excruciating sensitivity of someone whose hobbies include rescuing bugs. It has the urgency of a movie star who has taken a last sip of air before swimming through an underwater cave towards the light, only to find it’s an interior car light at night and they are speeding with an ex-lover hoping insults don’t become slaps and cause a crash. Withdrawal, disassociation, and rage offer relief, but the narrator finds she is seeking more. Uncompromising tenderness and deeper understanding of herself than she thought would ever be possible.
HEAL! brings you back into your body, finds your heart, and reminds you that to heal is not to fix, but to feel comfortable in the darkness.
ISBN 978-0-473-63991-4
“[There] is [a] part of the poem that blows me open. That takes the whole world and scallops me clean. That registers with such power. This is a world of work that swings through my head has swung through my head since the day I read it.”
“I read this book in one sitting. Paralysed by the beauty, purpose and pungency of the writing.
If the ancestral goddess speaks, it speaks in Simone’s lyrical ahioahio. We enter a whirlpool of words. They pull us in, hold us close enough to hear the text breathing. Momentum builds, in spiralling, cycling motion until - for a moment - it is as if we see through the cool eye of the hurricane.
This is a powerful witnessing. As Audre Lorde says, our silences have never saved us. Simone Kaho will save more than one life by writing her own trail into the hurricane and out. ”
“Simone Kaho navigates, reveals and transcends the paths of human trauma. Her writing is urgent, visceral, and deeply thoughtful all at once. In this confronting tale of sexual violence and survival, there is ferocity and tenderness, rage and hope, howling and singing. In the end, HEAL! teaches us to go forward in our flawed, beautiful world.”