Damaged Like Me
Release Date: June 29, 2021
Bring a reading of Damaged Like Me to your local bookstore, poetry slam, café or library.
Bring a reading of Damaged Like Me to your local bookstore, poetry slam, café or library.
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Social hierarchies cause damage. At the same time, people who have been damaged by this world—thrown away, marginalized, traumatized, oppressed—are more capable of apprehending harmful social patterns, precisely because they’ve needed to be vigilant about how the world works.
For too long, though, those with long-held rights and entitlements have claimed that survivors are biased about the very topics on which they have the greatest expertise. This powerful collection of essays reveals a complex social landscape—a living map of pain, survival, and compassion. A mix of personal memoir and sociological acumen, each piece seeks to build roads to a more equitable and loving collective culture of body sovereignty, racial justice, and gender liberation. They demonstrate the humane insights, approaches, and knowledge of those on the receiving end of inequity and violence, those whose “objectivity” on issues of oppression has been consistently maligned despite their having the most to teach us. |
Advanced Praise for Damaged Like Me
“Kimberly Dark has forever transformed the way I understand sex, gender, and the notion of ‘damage.’ The patriarchy should be terrified of this book. The rest of us can stick it in our hearts—emboldenment for the revolution.”
— Ariel Gore, Author of Hexing the Patriarchy
"Kimberly Dark profoundly understands the power of storytelling to create change. Damaged Like Me begins with her body and reaches out toward new meaning-making in a burst of resilience and imagination. Each dazzling essay asks what we might learn from the tensions, contradictions, erasures and difficulties we have inhabited at the edges of culture, and how we may yet reinvent ourselves and new communities. These brilliant insights will illuminate new paths even through the troubled dark."
— Lidia Yuknavitch, Author of The Small Backs of Children, The Chronology of Water, and The Book of Joan
"In Damaged Like Me, Kimberly Dark weaves together philosophical thoughts, sociopolitical commentary and personal narrative, with writing so evocative that at times I felt I was Kimberly. Riveting, honest, and haunting truth-telling."
— Lindo Bacon, PhD, Scientist and Author of Radical Belonging and Health at Every Size
"There are few spaces outside of Disability Justice where the mess and mayhem of trauma is allowed to exist alongside abiding dignity. Damaged Like Me is one of them. Kimberly Dark has handed us a Shame Free template for telling all our shifting truths. A spell, in fact. We, the damaged, are emboldened to show up for ourselves and each other. We are given tools for blunting the stab of Bias. We are re-routed from the deceptive road-map that has us hell-bent on Triumph. Together we will be traitors to silence and we will survive this too.
These are stories of the ways trauma shapes us and stays with us. Of the broken-into body and just how much language matters. They detail the inter-related thought systems that perpetuate child abuse, racism, fat bias, and misogyny."
— Dr. Lucy Aphramor, Dietitian, Founder of Well Now, co-author of Body Respect
"Kimberly's writing is intimate and haunting—she kicks you in the gut while holding your emotions in the palm of her hand."
— Jessamyn Stanley, author of Every Body Yoga & Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance
— Ariel Gore, Author of Hexing the Patriarchy
"Kimberly Dark profoundly understands the power of storytelling to create change. Damaged Like Me begins with her body and reaches out toward new meaning-making in a burst of resilience and imagination. Each dazzling essay asks what we might learn from the tensions, contradictions, erasures and difficulties we have inhabited at the edges of culture, and how we may yet reinvent ourselves and new communities. These brilliant insights will illuminate new paths even through the troubled dark."
— Lidia Yuknavitch, Author of The Small Backs of Children, The Chronology of Water, and The Book of Joan
"In Damaged Like Me, Kimberly Dark weaves together philosophical thoughts, sociopolitical commentary and personal narrative, with writing so evocative that at times I felt I was Kimberly. Riveting, honest, and haunting truth-telling."
— Lindo Bacon, PhD, Scientist and Author of Radical Belonging and Health at Every Size
"There are few spaces outside of Disability Justice where the mess and mayhem of trauma is allowed to exist alongside abiding dignity. Damaged Like Me is one of them. Kimberly Dark has handed us a Shame Free template for telling all our shifting truths. A spell, in fact. We, the damaged, are emboldened to show up for ourselves and each other. We are given tools for blunting the stab of Bias. We are re-routed from the deceptive road-map that has us hell-bent on Triumph. Together we will be traitors to silence and we will survive this too.
These are stories of the ways trauma shapes us and stays with us. Of the broken-into body and just how much language matters. They detail the inter-related thought systems that perpetuate child abuse, racism, fat bias, and misogyny."
— Dr. Lucy Aphramor, Dietitian, Founder of Well Now, co-author of Body Respect
"Kimberly's writing is intimate and haunting—she kicks you in the gut while holding your emotions in the palm of her hand."
— Jessamyn Stanley, author of Every Body Yoga & Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance