"Through an examination of the poetry of Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldus, We Heal From Memory paints a vivid picture of how our culture carries a history of traumatic violence - child sexual abuse, the ownership and enforcement of women's sexuality under slavery, the transmission of violence through generations, and the destruction of non-white cultures and their histories through colonization.

As Cassie Premo Steele demonstrates, the poetry of Sexton, Lorde, and Anzaldua allows us to witness and to heal from such disparate traumatic events because the "evidence" is not to be found in the events themselves but in the survivors' painful reaction to having survived.".

"It is not the event itself that determines whether it is traumatic; it is the way that the survivor survives such violence by not experiencing it in the normal way we experience and remember. This is why poetry allows survivors to witness others' survival: poetry, like trauma, takes images, feelings, rhythms, sounds, and the physical sensations of the body as evidence.

It is in attending to this "evidence" that we may realize that not only women, but all of us - men, women, and children - are hurt by the horror of violence, and such witnessing leads to the realization that we do not have to continue to be either the victims or the perpetrators of such violence if we heal from memory."--BOOK JACKET.