Trailer Park Shakes by Justene Dion-Glowa

These poems, while dreamlike and playful, bear unflinching witness to the workings of injustice — how violence is channeled through institutions and refracted intimately between people, becoming intertwined with the full range of human experience, including care and love. Trailer Park Shakes is a book that seems to want to hold everything — an entire cross-section of lived experience — written by a poet whose courage, attention, and capacity to trace contradiction inspire trust in her words’ embrace. Dion-Glowa’s poems are quietly philosophical, with a heartfelt, self-possessed politic.

Praise for Trailer Park Shakes:

“Dion-Glowa’s voice crackles with frank, startling insight.”—Sachiko Murakami, author of Render

“A collection that should and will rattle your cage and shine a light where it is needed.”—John Brady McDonald, author of Kitotam

“Another of Dion-Glowa’s best assets is their talent for clear-eyed observations on the nature of poverty and its afterlives.”—Tara McGowan-Ross, Vallum

“For those who have suffered injustice, childhood trauma, or violence, it can often be difficult to re-examine the past and understand the complexity of emotions involved: The hurt of painful events runs deep. It seems that for Dion-Glowa, there is healing in honesty, in the act of proclamation. To finally call the truth out, to finger-point, to say out loud how it feels is to process grief. Here anger, sadness, guilt, and resentment, are not emotions to bottle up but emotions to express as a way to heal. This fearlessness shines through the collection, inviting readers to revisit their own lives in a sort of cleansing ritual.”—Kendra Heinz, Room

“In these challenging, questioning, deeply personal, and darkly political poems, Justene Dion-Glowa asks difficult questions, and the stories she tells as partial answers offer little space for distance, which is as it should be in such poetry of witness.”—Sharon L. Barnes, University of Wyoming’s Journal of Working-Class Studies