Get Your Footprints Out of My Garden

Get Your Footprints Out of My Garden
by K.J. Moss
Published by Wood Dragon Books
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.99 ISBN 9781990863509

Poetry can sometimes be obscure and leave readers feeling that they just don’t “get” the work, and thus, they’re unable to connect with it. No one could accuse Moose Jaw resident Karran Moss, a longtime Registered Massage Therapist and new poet, of writing ambiguous work: the poems in her fifty-piece collection, Get Your Footprints Out Of My Garden, are clear-eyed, plain-spoken and easily understandable.

Moss explains in her introduction that at age twelve, during a Grade Seven school trip, she was “trapped in an elevator with a predator.” Further trauma occurred when a “well-meaning group of people” tried “to ‘pray’ the trauma out of [her],” which served only to exacerbate her PTSD: “religion became a trauma trigger,” she writes, and this collection is her “journey of growth and healing.” During therapy, “these poems started flying out of [her] soul.” As she continued working on her diagnosed c-PTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) with a psychologist, the healing began. The tone and “frenzy” of the poems changed, and her “life started to make sense.”

The vulnerable and hopeful meditations are organized into three sections, “Trauma,” “Healing,” and “Living,” and of these, I found the poems in the “Trauma” section the strongest. Here the poet speaks to her inner child, and the first poem begins with the effective line: “And just like that my world crumbles.” She outlines the transformation in her personality after the elevator incident, and over the course of the poem she self-talks her way toward peace and health. “You are a powerful beautiful soul,” she writes, and “You can manage this life. Find the light.” In the next poem her anger is evident. Of her abuser, she writes “You suck the life out of kids.” She says: “The rats and the serpents/can feast on you,” and she calls him “Festering puss.”

Too many girls have to live with the devastating effects of childhood sexual abuse, and among the saddest outcomes is that they’re robbed of childhood joy. In “Dear 12-Year-Old Self,” Moss begins: “Dear little brown-eyed girl./I lost you” and assures her inner child that she is “A caged animal about to have a new life.” A happy life. Sensory pleasures—ie: “subtle shifts in the wind—represent newfound joy, and a mind’s “Full of little listens.”

Another consequence of trauma is difficulty with interpersonal relationships, and Moss examines this in poems that reveal that though she “push[es] people away,” she doesn’t “want anyone to go.” A kind of exorcism of negative thoughts, habits and relationships is unveiled. A twenty-year marriage is examined, a stalker addressed. A healthier woman emerges.

The puzzle of putting herself back together is a challenge, but the poet is “so close to putting it all together.” Through stillness, deep breathing, therapy and writing, Moss survives and is on her way to thriving. Once “a lifeless broken glass” that was “not capable of holding any form,” the poet learns that her “authentic self is a masterpiece,” and as readers, we can celebrate with her.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM