Out in the Dark: a queer road to mental health

By Suzan Digh

This collection of found poetry explores the mental health issues that surrounded one woman's experience of coming out as queer, and the subsequent struggles with both internal and external acceptance, medical interventions, sexuality, and the misuse of sex, drugs, and alcohol as coping mechanisms.

Found poetry is a type of poe

• Language: English
• Publisher: SD Publishing
• Release date: Jun 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781998061129

Book preview

Out in the Dark:

a queer road to mental health

ISBN: 978-1-998061-12-9

Copyright © 2023 Suzan Digh

All rights reserved.

Cover Art by Suzan Digh

To my wife.  I am so glad to have found you.

Contents

Introduction

A Little Crazy

The Falling

Treatment

Seeking

Abuses

Coming Out

Just Plain Queer

The Rising

Introduction

This is a collection of Found poetry wherein the poet erases or blacks out (redacts) the bulk of the words on a page and the words that remain are used to create poetry; these remaining words appear in the poems in the same sequence as in the original text.

The source document is an early draft version of my recently completed (as yet unpublished) creative non-fiction novel which explores the mental health issues that surrounded my coming out as queer, and my subsequent struggles with acceptance, medical interventions, sexuality, drugs, and alcohol.

In this book the words do retain their original order, however, capitalization, punctuation, and line spacing have been modified in many of the poems.

The poems’ titles consist of a number (and letter) representing the order the poem came out of the source document, and whether it was a digital blackout (B) or an erasure (E).  I left many of the erased poems in their original shape on the page, with the spacing as it appeared.  In some cases there was more than one poem per page, and those are marked with a small letter (i.e. 70b).

The poems have been arranged in chapters so the poems will be out of numerical sequence.  If there is a poem number missing, it is because that poem was edited out of the collection before publication.

Some of these poems have been previously published in Another Dark Place where the image of the source document was included.  In this collection I have not included any of the source document’s blacked out images so it will read more like a traditional poetry book. 

And, the final note is… this collection is very dark.  Mental health struggles are real, and the source novel explores some very dark experiences, so it is not unexpected that the poetry stemming from that text reflects this darkness.

There is light at the end, we just have to get there.

A Little Crazy

23.

morning,

dark, empty

I talk, but the echo - loud -

in my mind.

My voice feels strange,

different from mine.

85b.

I stand in the rain.

People smile, meaningless —

    some with auras.

I stare through averted eyes;

they seem ordinary.

A raindrop lands,

the dark spot spreads.

91.

I shudder at the thought:

(never