dwelling, by Michaela Godding

Poetry, chapbook, 20 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

In her debut chapbook collection, dwelling, Michaela Godding unravels her complicated relationship with the roles she inhabits in her day-to-day life as a daughter, woman, gendered body, and raw human. Each poem lyrically navigates the origins of her identity based boundaries, and dare to ask what it means to truly, and finally, come home.

This collection weaves in and out of memoir and metaphor, and attempts to articulate the non-tangible aspects of trauma that linger in places where most are too afraid to look. dwelling gives permission to both Godding and the reader to question why we are the way we are, even if it means staring at what hurt us and not looking away. Underneath all the hurt is something important and invaluable - the truth, and the self, which this chapbook explores as one and the same, even if it often seems like those things are ever changing.

Michaela Godding is a 25-year-young multidisciplinary artist. As a current creative writing teacher to high school seniors, she prioritizes using and teaching writing as a means of processing reality. More of her work can be found in the Connecticut Bards Poetry Review Book of 2022, Rabble Review Issues Number 4 and Number 5, and in Nova Prism's Lantern Zine. You can also find her on instagram @god.ding