Touching the Landscape Within

In an extraordinary collection of poetry, Deborah Alston Wroblewski tells how she became lost and then found due to a mistake, an oversight, probably by a well-meaning doctor, that determined the course of her life. Even at seventy-two, she still struggled to transcend and understand this early trauma of congenital hip dysplasia discovered too late.

As a two-year-old, Wroblewski knew something was very wrong. Her small body was encased in a plaster cast that extended from armpits to ankles. She quickly learned about pain, imprisonment, separation, ridicule, and soldiering on. Her confinement lasted one year, but didn’t end there. This condition deeply affected her mother, father and brother, along with all the people who would come to love her. She carried these inner and outer wounds, along with their effects, and they influenced every decision she would make in her life. She became the girl with the odd gait, the disability, which then defined her.

The poems in Touching the Landscape Within weave together her story and her ultimate healing and self-acceptance.