Imagine being attacked by a former partner while taking a child to school on an otherwise ordinary morning. In Consent, Erin Hoover's third collection, she traces the events leading up to and following that incident through narrative poems that capture the day-to-day realities of coercive control and the one-step-forward, two-steps-back journey of healing from intimate partner violence.
Urgent, incisive, and keenly self-aware, these poems yield startling revelations about the volatile nature of traumatic memory. Hoover collages texts drawn from the rhetoric of dominant/submissive BDSM protocols, pamphlets on abuse from shelters, survivor testimonies, annotations of her own writings from within her relationship, and interviews recorded in recovery, producing a defiantly non-linear survivor narrative shaped by documentary poetics. Consent lays bare the expectations imposed on partners and children subjected to domestic violence in a culture that produces and protects abuse, ultimately rejecting the abuser's manipulations in favor of the body's own undeniable truth.