<p>How to Adjust to the Dark is a multi-genre novella about coming to terms with trauma and depression through every tool available, ranging from poetry to psychiatric medicine to tarot reading. Van Laer illustrates her break from poetry, her fall into increasingly destructive relationships, and the spiral of an artist without their art. Built around poems, the book reflects on the identities we create for ourselves through writing―and the ways in which those identities confine and fail us.</p>

How to Adjust to the Dark

Van Laer, Rebecca

Parenting & Relationships

Curbside Splendor Pub

<p>Beginning with a heroic couplet found inside a fortune cookie and ending with the novella's titular poem, How to Adjust to the Dark is both a collection of poetry and self-examination by a poet, Charlotte, looking back on her early twenties after an extended period of writer's block. Explicating the romantic relationships, personal history, and struggles embedded in each of her poems, Charlotte gradually uncovers the many versions of herself she has inhabited and the traumas woven into her beliefs about who she was as a writer and person at each critical point in time. A hybrid of prose, poetry, and theory in the vein of Bluets and Leaving the Atocha Station, How to Adjust to the Dark is a writer's frank, extended examination of the idea that falling in love and making art have to hurt to be good, and the work it takes to disentangle oneself from this notion in order to grow into who it is we want to be, what we wish to write about, and how we choose to make a life.</p>

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Long Day Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Van Laer, Rebecca. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Van Laer, Rebecca

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Van Laer, Rebecca. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

How to Adjust to the Dark

How to Adjust to the Dark