Lindsay Soberano Wilson's second full-length book of poems, Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues: Poems For Healing, finds peace in painful, messy, shameful parts of life unearthed at inconvenient times. With poems about suicide, sexual assault, addiction, intergenerational trauma, domestic violence, Toronto 90s rave culture, and a pandemic, Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues finds light in the darkness.
The visual and lyrical poems, shed light on hard truths while inspiring readers to "Dance Through the Dark" to find "Glimmers," instead of tripping on triggers like the poem, "I Tripped on a Wound Today" about being a third-generation Holocaust survivor. As the creator of Put It To Rest, a mental health literary online hub, Lindsay believes in putting painful stories to rest by writing them out to let them go: Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues weaves in and out of childhood, coming of age, and adulthood on a healing journey to put the past behind, embrace the present, and trust the future.
In the opening poem, "I Call This Trauma", the narrator discovers that untying "knots" to fix everything is fruitless, eventually turning to acceptance in "Hope, Are You There?" Breaking Up With The Cobalt Blues culminates in a heroic call to action to break up with victimhood to embrace trauma healing reflected in the beauty of the "northern lights."
Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues takes readers on a journey from victimization to becoming self-empowered curators of life, despite the freefall from grace into everyday beauty like being open to receiving "Glimmers."
So just maybe one can never really break up with the "blues" but there's no reason why the blues can't morph into a softer hue that's part of life rather than a defining moment.
Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues is about making peace with grief and not letting the past define you, but recreating a future that accepts that pain is a part of life, allowing growth. The concluding poem "Stay Gold" is a tribute to the friends we've lost too soon, accepting that only the good die young.