The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems By AdrieKusserow. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2024. 158 pages. ISBN: 9781478025573 (pp) & 9781478020844 (hdbck)

The Trauma Mantras is a brilliantly crafted ethnographic memoir that skips between genres—now poetry, now prose; now ethnography, now memoir; now anthropological deconstruction of biomedicine, now Buddhist deconstruction of emptiness and mind/body duality. The text veers between lush adjectival prose and spare verbal punches of poetic drama. Combining more than three decades of anthropological journeys that return again and again to similar locations with singular specificity, it is a rich study of cross-cultural reflections on ways of being human. While Kusserow has stated that her book is "not poetry" at a recent reading I attended, it seems poetry adjacent with its concrete and expansive uses of and reflections on ways of knowing and being human, including language, evolution, emotions, narrative, and experience. With nearly every chapter given a place-name, Kusserow's book might be considered a love triangle of three regions—(1) Northeast Kingdom Vermont, (2) Northwest India and Nepal Himalayas, and (3) South Sudan. Each region plays a dramatic role in the narrative, offering a memorable set of flavors and storylines that recur in the threaded narrative. By the end of the text, the reader easily shifts between the skull trees and dry desert of South Sudan where youths kickbox to keep war at bay; Himalayan Buddhist monasteries where the monks and swarmy meditators seek release and redemption; and the soft hills, lush forests, and stale classrooms of rural Vermont where Kusserow rambles with her students, refugee collaborators, and family members. It is no surprise that this is a tale of human wandering across evolutionary time and geographic space. These wanderings and musings include multiple overlapping dyads—of refugees and "psychonauts," anthropologists and their subjects, mothers and children, students and teachers, East and West, nature and culture, psychologists and patients, those being born and those dying, technotropia and dystopia, and many other juxtaposed noun pairs. It turns its anthropological gaze even on its own noun-heavy English grammar when reflecting how the Potowatami grammar turns nouns into verbs as Robin Wall Kimmerer deftly explained in Braiding Sweetgrass (2013). Kusserow handily shows how grammar can shape human thought and action as she reflects how the poverty of a single indeterminate pronoun like "it" that lumps lawnmowers and iPhones with living beings like hummingbirds and orange-spotted newts has produced an Anglo-Saxon propensity to ignore the animacy and endless fluidity of nature and our climate. With insight and humility, Kusserow wonders if her own predilection for adjectives when gazing adoringly at her warm and yeasty infant son or pink veined pouches of lady's slippers is a kind of "giddy … effervescence" that might make it harder to destroy the animacy of the natural world (150). Kusserow refuses to let herself out of her critique, as she queries the ways that western psychiatry exports its Trauma, Inc. across the globe. With ample self-reflexivity, she exposes her American individualist efforts to prove herself an anthropologist by telling a variety of bildungsroman that will satisfy her students desire to consume stories of intrepid travelers who bring back stories from faraway places. While Kusserow is paid to teach and tell such stories in the classroom, her text warns the reader not to yield to such simplicity. Instead, we might consider complex questions of whose stories are favored, for what ends, and for whom? She quotes her wise mother, who once told her to "choose your story well" because once it is coaxed into being "it might be hard to remove later, without cutting down the whole tree" (21). Kusserow describes whole flocks of stories as cultural "murmurations" that beat up against each other; as when Sudanese refugees attend a trauma writing workshop in Burlington, Vermont alongside college kids from St. Michael's and writing coaches schooled in PTSD diagnoses. The result is a kaleidoscopic view of how trauma becomes its own storyline, shaping narrative, myth, and metaphor. Throughout the book, Kusserow flavors her meditations on the human condition with a deeply Tibetan Buddhist perspective of spacious mind (sems pa chen mo) that includes emptiness (sunyata), impermanence, and interdependence. These Buddhist concepts perch alongside quantum theory meditations that contrast Newtonian and Western Enlightenment theories of solid objects falling through space with Einstein's relativity of curved space that encompasses the endless duality and fluidity of waves and particles without choosing between them. Kusserow's sparkling prose can juxtapose multiple perspectives and cultural truths simultaneously without privileging one over the other. This is no small feat in today's polarized economies of thoughts, actions, and identities. The final section of The Trauma Mantras provides a beautiful meditation on the evolution of social epochs that we humans have already traversed. In chapters titled "The Trouble with Anthropocene Grammar"; "Hush, Humans"; and "Mismatch Theory," Kusserow deftly identifies the threads of human activity including language and world-making that have led humans from hunter-gatherer days to modern cyborg realities. Alluding to a set of scenes humans have traveled most recently after the Paleolithic and Holocene, including "Anthropocene, Technocene, Thermocene, Capitalocene, Coronacene," Kusserow offers a meditation on the evolutionary mismatch of our thuggish human minds in the modern era (151). With human brains and instincts "designed for hunter-gatherers, all gunshot and adrenaline," we are a "scrappy, dogged species, we've crawled to the top, shoveling our genes into the next generation, made possible day after day by a grand illusion (that the self is closer to wood than wave)" (139). Vivid metaphors and stark verbs tumble one after the other sketching profound truths about the human condition such as our relentless pursuit of productivity and our refusal to pause between stimulus and response that leads to a deep-seated fear of death, rather than an ability to "lean down and inhale the ripe rot of the self" (114). Kusserow's meditations on our "sweaty tribe" of humans whose mental formations—the Buddhist term for thoughts and emotions or one of five aggregates (skandha) making up human sensory experience—offers both hope and despair (5). Perhaps we have lost the ability to allow sadness to congeal as we peck and tap at our devices so as to consume and digest jagged suffering into well-minced but ultimately unsatisfying realities. In describing her aging mother, she may be looking at us all: "Hunched over, part hunter-gatherer, part reluctant cyborg … wilted, resigned, like a refugee, knowing full-well we can never go home again" (112).