Self-Imposed Exile

Gwen Frost's powerful second poetry collection portrays the exile of otherness in a fractured world.
"If you are reading this, say aloud / what you most fear," Gwen Frost instructs in the opening poem from her second collection; a bit later she begins the middle section with the admonition "If you are reading this / you are not ready. / You are too early-- / it has already passed." Through the progression of her poetry she deliberately challenges and unsettles her readers, preparing them for the question posed at the start of her final section, "Do you become the stories / you are told about yourself?" In response, she suggests that "The paradox of happiness / is that you are the story / and the writer. / Self-imposed exile / is leaving / and telling yourself, / you had to." Frost accepts such exile as the cost of embracing her otherness, from which perspective she observes our fractured world and forces us to do so with her: "are we not all a culture that teaches us to abuse power?" These are jarringly honest and vulnerable poems, and in sharing them Frost offers the comfort of recognition to her fellow exiles. "There is one chance to say everything I have ever wanted to," she writes, "and I need to finish the book." Frost has finished this book, but readers must hope that a poetic voice as powerful and original as hers will return with far more to say.