Unleashed, Celebrating My Dignity, per Elizabeth, “Was retrieved from pop up memories indelibly carved into my mind, spirit and soul. It defines where I was, who I Elizabeth P Brooks am, and where I am going. Some of my work is taken from my journals, scrap paper, and a previously published chapbook, “You May Applaud Now and Other poems”, a Boldly Into Grace BIG publication and some published essays. I am still connecting the dots and forever celebrating HUMAN DIGNITY. This is my Why! I write to speak to the wail of pain that I hear, loud and clear but it is ignored by some and disregarded. I hear the sound, the rumble, the inner turmoil. In the silence, I hum to the pain and in the dead of night, I rock my body to sleep for oppressed and bewildered people. I listen and I speak to the pain of inequality and injustice, and I obey, and I write, too early in the morning or after a numbed night. Yes, love wins every time I speak to my pain.”
Elizabeth speaks:
Reviews of Unleashed
Unleashed is a Poetry and Memoir Collage This book made me smile and cry, as I could
Brenda Amazon 5 Star
relate to the many stories and feelings expressed throughout the pages. It made such an impact,
that I just purchased another.
Unleashed is a Poetry and Memoir Collage E.P. Brooks has adopted her reader as family, in her book Unleashed: Celebrating My Dignity. Her honest and revelation-filled text is a gift. It is as honored insiders that we read her journal entry over her shoulder about her sleeping and waking at all hours and writing and begging God for forgiveness ! And it is as cherished audience members that we are treated to her poems interwoven between the pages of her unfolding life story. I have the distinct pleasure to be familiar with many of Brooks’ poems, but Brooks knocked me down with her poem The Call of the Child when she detailed how she prays for all children she sees. In the last stanza, she ultimately invites/challenges us to do the same “to change our world!” This book seeks to be a blessing to all, a living and loving call to be our interconnected best selves. And it delivers.
C. Moon Amazon 5 star
Poetry – I really like the Poems but the author also was speaking for millions on women regarding what
Grace R Amazon 5-Star
happened to her as a young child through adulthood. While some may say keep it bottled in, I believe
she did the right thing by letting it out. (my mom would have said she should had done it sooner) I
hope she now has peace in her heart. God bless you.
I refuse to be bent and twisted anymore. It is with this assertion that Black Trinidad-and-Tobago-born artist Elizabeth Pascalle Brooks puts a match to silencing and so ignites a poetry and prose that blazes into being throughout Unleashed. The question then is: will you withstand the heat of not only the pain but also the joy that Brooks stokes?
A hybrid work that seamlessly blends memoir and poetry, Unleashed never flinches. Although she admits, “I speak to the sound of my cry and try to stifle it inside,” Brooks recognizes that “the sound has pain of its own” that must be consoled by bearing witness to trauma — and in so doing, healing. Injustice, “recognizable as if it were a zit on a newborn baby’s face,” invades her experiences as a young girl, teenager, and woman. Chronic illness, a dehumanizing medical industry, domestic violence, sexual assault, rape culture, toxic masculinity, sexism, racism, class war, police brutality, immigration, and colonization all mark her experiences. The effects they wreak are complex and devastating. Secrecy, loss of identity, and alienation rupture her relationships with herself, her loved ones, and her world. Brooks keenly expresses this fragmentation through an awareness of opportunities dashed when one closes herself off to living honestly and receptively.
Grief dotted my heart, sunk into my marrow and seeped into my soul. But my soul wouldn’t die. How does this harmed yet defiant soul respond to her traumas? By choosing faith in Christ, for one. Unleashed opens with a testament to the empowerment and healing Brooks experiences by yielding completely to the Holy Spirit. “God stitched into me,” she announces, “threads of persistence, resiliency, and knots of boldness to sustain me.” Finding humor in her pain is another salve that mends her wounds. Consider the time when even an injured ankle couldn’t stop her fabulousness: “Once I sprained my left ankle and visited a podiatrist wearing 3.5 inch heels. I did not know that was an oddity.” Or when, as a child, she grappled with conflicting desires, a deep love of dancing and a calling to become a Catholic nun: “One of my older cousins informed me that I could not become a dancing nun and I was stunned. That devastated me.” Poor child!Memories of her parents also soothe her injured spirit. Her father’s favoritism and unshakable belief in her capacity to succeed appear as cherished moments in her childhood. Meanwhile, Brooks renders her mother’s love and character as particularly influential. “She was the first feminist I knew,” explains Brooks, who describes her mother’s empowerment and agency in the face of unchecked patriarchy, sexism, and racism. In a world wherein the dominant image of women’s role as submissive structures social relations, her mother was owner of a print shop and directly participated in union organizing during the rising labor movement of Trinidad. The image of her mother marching in high heels with the Oil Workers Trade Union conjures a woman dedicated both to workers’ rights and fashionability, a woman who finds these two seemingly contradictory commitments wholly compatible.
Her mother’s creative wordplay also fascinates Brooks. For instance, “Pocksy Tocks,” a phrase that adopts onomatopoeia to derive meaning as an alternative to high heel shoes, drawing on the musicality of heels click-clacking on a hard surface, points to her mother’s rich imagination. This linguistic artistry leaves a lasting impression. “Whenever I get dressed and put on high heels; one of my favorite things — I heard the sound of “pocksy tocks,” the cackle of my shoe heel on solid ground — I derived great comfort and confidence when I realized I could recreate the sound my mother used to make.” A seemingly frivolous figurative flourish is in fact the interface between memory and lived reality, a process that metaphorically revives her mother and literally empowers Brooks. The creative control of language to describe one’s experience depicted here may suggest an important facet of Brooks’s holistic healing from trauma. Unleashed is replete with similar insights. And my heart is like a drum, skin stretched to the limit, beating like a battle march drum but to survive I improvise and go inside and listen to my rhythm. Brooks marks writing, and poetry in particular, as a source of immeasurable strength, not only in her own life, but in the very structure of Unleashed. Prose sections are followed by poems, and vice versa. Some poems rely on narrative,
Angel J.