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by Aurora Hatchel (Author)
Would you give up anything and everything to be yourself? This is the aftermath of transition, and I sort through the wreckage, looking for the pieces of me that still have life in them.
"If there is nothing new under the sun, then Aurora's poems lie tucked beneath a shade tree. As Aurora examines how appearance can be a false advertisement for inward essence, she starts with her own experience-what it's like to know you are a woman before being seen as one-and proceeds to shake other things free from their faulty labels. She describes teaching students as they write "essays about the National Anthem / as though it isn't a song celebrating the beauty / of a bombing." She reveals the lack of imagination of author JK Rowling-lauded for dreaming up wizards with powers of transformation but failing to see that "magic was in [the trans community] the whole time." Enough of lying labels, of what's been in the sunlight so long it's grown stale, her poems seem to say. Aurora craves the "satisfaction [...] of seeing yourself as indelible / instead of a ghost haunting your own life." She unflinchingly brings the inner outward, with a fresh voice that will "fill [the]room" even though it "sometimes still doesn't have room for [her]." This collection of poems is a fresh exploration not only of gender, motherhood, and the trans experience, but of humanity. It is essential reading for those tired of obvious narratives, sun-parched and withering. It offers company and clarity for readers digging into the rich dirt of their interior selves, looking for the tender and explosive seeds that Aurora believes are begging for our care."
- Amy Barger
"Vulnerable, restorative, liberating-Aurora shouts not into the void but across the chasms of time and memory in this arresting collection of poetry. She weaves an odyssey of self-love and acceptance that feels melancholic at times and triumphant in others but always, always hauntingly tender. Sadness and Sadness Accessories is such a necessary body of work in a world where authenticity has become a business and grief an industry. The experiences and emotions we wade through are almost confrontational in their honesty, and in many regards, being a reader here feels more like bearing witness to an excavation of self. As Aurora digs into the viscera of womanhood through fraught introspections on love, mothering, and femininity, she offers herself up as an eternal work in progress in the best way-a woman always changing, evolving, and blooming. She reminds us that what of the world we cannot bear, we conjure with words instead."
- Kaylan Freeman
