This was my first ever chapbook. I wrote it while in college and going through an intense Dialectical Behavior Therapy program due to some pretty nasty mental health problems I was going through at the time. It's very much confessional trauma poetry. I cringe at a lot of these, though some of the imagery still holds up. Jovian Flesh & Fauna is about conveying the experience of growing up in a cult. Afterimages is about realizing that you had grown up in a bad environment that may or may not have been a cult. It's about feeling a need to justify who you are today and how you behave with narratives of trauma but not being certain which narratives are true. People still often tell me they like this one for some reason, so I continue to distribute it.
A lot of the imagery is related to a fun piece of lore: I was born with a cognitive-visual disorder! I frequently get double-vision, have trouble processing low-light, and get lots of afterimages and weird visual static. It's shocking I was able to get a driver's license but generally the distortion are easy to "see past."
Yes, that's right, I made an audiobook. You can listen to baby shel read you some poems. It has weird audio editing.