Loosing, Departing: Trauma and Temporality in Peony Gent’s Visual Poetry

This chapter analyses Peony Gent’s zines For Sarah and Drift, highlighting the intricate interplay between fact and fiction as these texts navigate the representation of trauma through spatial and temporal disruptions on the page. Gent’s zines unfold within layered spatial architectures that challenge conventional mappings of time and geography. In For Sarah, Gent revisits her childhood locales to process a friend’s suicide, using the walk as a material act of remembrance that integrates comics and concrete poetry to depict the journey. Similarly, Drift explores the end of a significant relationship, portraying loss through the physical and emotional landscapes of a city. Both works employ walking and reading as mechanisms to actualise trauma, utilising a mix of visual and verbal techniques to animate the narratives. These zines present the page as a composite of genres, where the act of reading becomes an act of active participation, underscoring the dynamic between the reader's engagement and the narrative progression.