Seven experimental books that reimagine how trauma is told

Erik Fuhrer is a queer, nonbinary poet, playwright, and trauma writing teacher. They hold a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow, an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, and a PMP. They are the author of nine books, including Gellar Studies (2023) and the forthcoming hybrid memoir My Buffed Up Life (2026). They were the UCLA Extension Winter 2026 Writer in Residence.

At Electric Lit Fuhrer tagged seven books by "writers use form to convey the experience, emotions, and structure of trauma, keeping the gaps, the flaws, the inventions, scalping together image and sensation into something legible but messy and tangled and raw." One title on the list:

Nox by Anne Carson

Nox is an elegy for Carson’s brother, who was already partially ghost before he passed, as he left home and called rarely in his absence. In a way this elegy started years before his death, and the reproduced letters, family photographs, and sketches montaged into the book are a testament to the imprints of his presence in her life before and after death. Its accordion spine mimics an ancient scroll, log, and epic, its creased pages paralleling the fracturedness of grief. It cannot be viewed all at once, so sprawling that it would take up many rooms of feet, and therefore becomes like the history and the memory and the body lost to it: accessible in small unfoldings of time and space, but never quite tangible and accessible as a whole.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue