"I danced each morning with Pina Bausch. I became her pupil lifting my leg up in the air like a flamingo except feeling more awake than I’ve ever been."
"I called out the demons one by one. I named them. I gave them precise blocking and ultimately, I controlled where they stood, breathed, and bourréed. I gave them an entrance, and a stage, and then I sent them away."
These pieces explore through personal experience the cultural phenomena of migrant loss of identity and subordination, post colonialism, othering
"I tend to take every loss of rainforest personally. My autoethnographic poetry 'The Threat' and 'John Doe' are reflective of this."
You will find ten poems by ten Albanian poets (mostly women poets) from Kosovo and Albania and our diaspora, translated into English by me.
There are multiple approaches to find one's poetic voice depending on the lens one chooses as a part of the author’s creative process.
"I have continued to explore the usefulness of various poetic forms as a mechanism for providing access to suppressed internal voices."
This collection of poems is a glimpse into the lives lived on the margins, where the laws put in place to protect basic rights and bodily autonomy cease to apply.
We invite you to participate in National Poetry month with us by reading and writing over at The AutoEthnographer's new Facebook group.
"Autoethnography and culture: Embodied inquiry is not a formula, or methodology, but a way of being, being open to the body as a source of knowledge, wonder, difficulty, fragility and utter joy."
My poem “Week After” explores my experience with assault, rape, and emotional abuse in a year and a half long relationship with an older man.
Ulla-Maija Matikainen·
All ContentAutoethnographic EssaysAutoethnographic PoetryEducationFrom the EditorsVolume 3, Issue 2 (2023)
··4 min read A tsunami of words, images, learned and pushed feelings and thoughts go through us every day. Poetry is a way to find our own voice.