Undersight, by Alison Hurwitz

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Alison Hurwitz has lived with inattentive attention deficit disorder all of her life, but was never diagnosed. As a girl, she was a daydreamer, easily distracted by question and detail. Though she found it extremely difficult to focus on things in which she had little interest, words always drew her in deeply, embracing, reassuring, and inspiring her creativity. As she grew older, she found ways to cope with her attention differences, but it was never easy, and she carried an invisible burden of shame through many years of her adult life. After both of her young sons were diagnosed with ADHD, she began to understand that this condition was, in large part, genetic. There was nothing “wrong” with her brain, and theirs. They just experienced the world a bit differently. It became her mission to help her children understand, work with, and celebrate their unique ways of being without bearing the twin burdens of self-criticism and shame.

Experiencing life with a neurodiverse mind and heightened empathy/sensory sensitivity presents both real challenges and unique rewards. Instead of focusing on ADHD as seen from the outside, Hurwitz delves beneath the surface. Through free verse, sonnet, golden shovel, pantoum, sestina, haibun and burning haibun, she explores such subjects as time blindness, sensory overload, flow state, fidgeting and deep focus. Through her work, she hopes to provide a sense of kinship and acknowledgment for the many people whose special brains shape their ways of encountering life. Poetry’s particular flexibility and freedom of association make it an especially rich medium for exploration of this kind, carrying its own Undersight.

Alison Hurwitz (she/her), alisonhurwitz.com, is a former cellist and dancer who finds music in language. Nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, Alison hosts the monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. Her work was acknowledged as a finalist for RockPaperPoem’s 2025 Poetry Award. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings and celebrations of life, takes long walks in the North Carolina woods with her husband, sons, and dog, and dances in her kitchen. This is her first chapbook.