Addiction, Family, and the Story Behind Lorne Daniel's What is Broken Binds Us
“I initially wrote the story of our family’s journey purely to record what was happening as it happened,” says poet and retired communications consultant Lorne Daniel about his poetry collection What is Broken Binds Us. “The addictive behaviours, the anger, the borderline housing challenges disrupted and changed week by week, month by month, over years and stretched into decades,” he says of one son’s journey. “While we tried to support him, it was often a real challenge to track what was happening, even to track where he was.”
As a writer, Daniel began to form his rough notes into something others could understand. “I found that short poems that just shared incidents from the journey were the best form because readers can pick up on the chaos, the jumble of a path that is not simple and not straight.” Even so, he grappled for a long time over whether to share the poems beyond family and friends.
“What convinced me to publish the very personal poems in this book with a broader readership was the experience of running into so many people who have been on similar journeys, but feel disconnected,” Daniel says. “In our society, the narratives often don’t fit the real lived experiences of families. ‘Troubled teens’ don’t always find a way through those troubles, parents become exhausted looking for answers, and there may not always be answers.”
“On multiple occasions,” Daniel says, “we went for years without hearing from our son. Sadly, those were more peaceful times than the full-on crises times.”
“Every family that experiences addictions and mental health challenges is unique, but there are emotional characteristics that we have in common. What is Broken Binds Us is my small gesture of connection.”
What is Broken Binds Us by Lorne Daniel, published by University of Calgary Press.
What is Broken Binds Us is a collection of poems of the disruptions and emotional tremors that shape us: enslaved families broken and dispersed, histories hidden, addiction and estrangement, and the shocks of bodily trauma.
What is Broken Binds Us shares stories of loss, absence, acceptance, and hope. Returning to the page after a long absence, poet Lorne Daniel provides a unique perspective on crisis that balances raw emotion with vulnerability, thoughtfulness, and care.
In seven sections, Daniel braids the stories of empire, personal traumas, addiction and family estrangement, shifting emergencies, and the wisdom of elders and the natural world. Lessons in Emergency Preparedness traces accident, injury and recovery, facing the trauma of a sudden loss of physical competence through the metaphorical and literal breaks of a shattered body and the slow movement towards mending. When the Tributaries Ran Rich unravels empire and a five-century narrative of hard-working immigrants with the discovery of enslavement in family records, forcing a deep reconsideration of the truth of the past. Episodic Tremor & Slip speaks of the tectonic shifts in family life that occur when facing substance abuse, addiction, and mental health struggles, of the pain of estrangement and the love that continues. In the Family Name is a reflection on time, on people, and on the natural world that revisits and turns over all that came before, exploring it from new angles.
Lorne Daniel writes with calm, conversational assurance. These poems are accessible and evocative, speaking from their specificity to the many people who have faced injury, estrangement, struggle, and pain, and must carry it—and carry on.
Lorne Daniel is a Canadian poet and non-fiction writer. He has been deeply engaged in the literary community, including the emergence of a Canadian prairie poetry scene in the 1970s. He has publsihed four books of poetry, edited anthologies and literary journals, and written freelance journalism. His work has been published in dozens of anthologies, journals, newspapers and magazines in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Lorne lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən people in Victoria, BC.