my first poetry chapbook ⋆.ೃ࿔

by Samantha Robyn Norrah

Manic Dizzy Dream Girl is a VERY paired down collections of poems from a span of 10 years of my life. A little record of what it felt like to be young, attractive, wild, terrified, romantic, angry, obsessed, spiritual, lonely, philosophical, and trying very hard to understand all the feels– without knowing another way to process them.

Paired with digital collage, the poetry brings you into my dreamscape and reality. Touching on girlhood, crushes that became entire cosmologies, misogyny, memory, psychosis, trauma, God, the hospital, the body, and the bizarre task of trying to come back to myself when I did not fully know where I had gone or why. They are dramatic because I was dramatic. They are messy because life was messy. They are also funny sometimes, because if we cannot laugh at the fact that our minds can turn one man in a purple bucket hat into a decade-long metaphysical event, then what are we even doing here?!?!?!?

This is not a neat healing story. It is the before, during, and after of becoming somebody I can recognize again. It is for the feeling, over-thinking, misdiagnosed, truamatized women who got called crazy when they were both scared and ashamed and even afraid of the shame itself, and are still finding a way to call themselves warriors anyway. 33 pages. 20 poems. One manic dizzy dream girl.