When the Wild Things Mend: On Hurt, Healing, and Heritage

We kneel in the wreckage
Palms upturned
Sorting shards
Here
        your grandmother’s silence
There
         my cracked defiance
We glue them with gold
Not to hide the breaks
But to make the seams glow

In this powerful debut poetry collection, Sahar Dandan maps the space between a woman’s silence and her scream, examining the wounds that shape womanhood and the legacies mothers pass on.

Dandan’s visceral and incisive poetry explores the ways women are taught to be, the shapes they are obliged to take, and the margins they are expected to confine themselves to. From generation to generation, these traditions are passed down in fairy tales left unfinished and lullabies sharpened into weapons.

Both arresting and resonant, When the Wild Things Mend challenges readers to plant gardens of rebellion and stitch their names into the spines of books they were told they shouldn’t write.