Let’s start back to front. First, role-playing. This likely brings to mind Dungeons and Dragons from 1974, a tabletop game that is, indeed, still wildly popular (and even used clinically in the psychotherapy space). While the games are similar, the term refers to something slightly different in video games. In both, you assume the role of a character and enact the narrative of that character; yet, in video games, you are most often playing a pre-set character with a relatively established narrative path using scripts provided for you instead of creating the scripts yourself. In Forspoken, you play as Alfre “Frey” Holland, a young adult woman who grew up in New York City. Her role, as we will discuss, involves being transported to an alternate medieval-esque world of magic and monsters, Athia, and discovering her connection to said world and its people. The role-playing element occurs as you vicariously live through Frey’s experiences in Athia.  

Next, and probably most self-evident yet confusing, is the term “action.” You may be thinking, “Aren’t all video games action?” After all, are you not taking actions in Pac-man as you consume fruits and ghosts, or in Space Invaders when you move the cannon on the bottom of the screen and shoot the aliens? You’re absolutely right, but there are plenty of games that involve slow, careful deliberation. I won’t get into this too much, but I find the easiest way of thinking about this is the difference between soccer and chess. Forspoken is much more in the camp of soccer; you make in-the-moment decisions as you play as Frey. In this case, these actions are restricted to moving around the screen and fighting the aforementioned monsters. Paradoxically, other than progressing the game, these actions have no direct bearing on the narrative of Forspoken, merely on the elements surrounding the narrative. For example, a quest (i.e., a portion of the overall plot) could ask you to save the father of one of Frey’s new friends in the new world of Athia. You must then travel to the specified destination, locate her father, and fight monsters on the way using magic. While the contents of the quest (i.e., saving the father) are core elements of the overall plot, how you carry it out (e.g., what path you take, what monsters you fight) usually does not matter more than being a conduit for the action elements of the game. Essentially, action games are a test of hand-eye coordination, dexterity, and processing speed.  

Finally, the term “open-world.” Games under this moniker allow players to take their character wherever they want in the game world. Traditionally, games followed a relatively constrained pattern––you could go only where the narrative was actively occurring. The open-world concept expanded this to allow players to explore areas other than those pertinent to the primary narrative. In the truest form, this allows players to access the entirety of the game’s area from the start. Most games, however, follow a variation of the traditional linear approach wherein new areas are locked by the progression of the main story but previous areas are accessible after they have first been explored. Forspoken follows this latter pattern. As you––Frey––complete the main story quests, you unlock new areas of the map. Subsequently, you unlock more powers that you can then use to more deeply explore the areas you’ve already been by accessing areas you could not get to without the new powers (e.g., the ability to cast water magic and glide on the surface of water). This game highlights a core element of video games, particularly in relation to other genres: the narrative is only one piece of the puzzle; some people mainly play for the story, others primarily enjoy the exploration and action, and the majority come for a combination of them all. 

Forspoken combines these three elements––role playing, action, and open world––to immerse the player in a fast-paced journey through Athia and Frey’s place within it. After being transported to Athia from New York City, Frey gains the ability to use nature magic and discovers the last bastion of human civilization in Athia. Her original goal is to find a way back to New York, leading her to help locate key individuals who may help her do so. As she learns more about the land’s history and politics––particularly the landscape as influenced by a magical and biological blight she calls the Break––Frey becomes the target of the former, all-powerful leaders of the world, the Tantas. These four women were once the saviors of the land, protecting its people from all threats. Yet you learn that they seemingly lost their minds around the time the Break started to devour the people and landscape; the Tantas turned against their people, their benevolence morphing into tyranny. They remain in their respective domains while the Break consumes more and more of the landscape, invading the people’s last city at the center of the landmass. Frey appears to be the only one unaffected by the Break. As such, she assumes the begrudging role of exploring beyond the limits of the city to confront the “evil” Tantas. Without getting too caught up in the finer details of the story, you learn the cause of the Tantas’ madness as you defeat them one by one. Eventually, Frey must also confront the instigator of their insanity while questioning her own place in her original life and the new life thrust upon her.  

First, our main character. Frey’s life experience falls under the “prototypical” model of chronic, complex trauma. She is a woman of color who grew up in the New York City foster care system after being found by the Holland Tunnel as an infant. The story starts in a courthouse where Frey is undergoing a hearing for petty theft, apparently a repeat offense. We learn that she has been doing small-time criminal jobs to get by after aging out of the foster system. Just when she has amassed enough money to leave the city, the derelict apartment she’s squatting in gets set on fire by former criminal associates with a grudge. She escapes, but the fire engulfs her cash savings. With nowhere left to go, she wanders to the Holland Tunnel to sit with her sorrow. As her hopelessness seems to peak, she sees a golden armband in an abandoned shop window, and upon touching the armband, she is whisked to Athia against her will.  

Frey has not had stability her entire life. Passed from family to family, she did not have a caregiver she could trust. She learned to take care of herself without relying on others, shunning––and, at times, backstabbing––all those who tried to get close to her. The feeling of abandonment from her family of origin colored all her interactions. She even believes that her world of origin abandoned her, stripping her of her future plans and allowing her to be shipped to a new world without any apparent means of returning. The people Frey meets in Athia initially serve only as a means of getting back to her world of origin. While she could be their protector, she vehemently resists this, at first covertly to delude those around her and then overtly as they expected more from her. Had Frey not been individually targeted by the Tantas, she would not have engaged in the plight of Athia’s people. She appeared selfish in her self-preservation, preventing these strangers from having the opportunity to hurt her. The narrative of the game is, in part, a restorative arc in which Frey learns to form stable, secure attachments, albeit through significant suffering. For example, Frey comes to trust the Athian governors, who initially jailed her and sought to kill her, after they gradually revealed their own trust in Frey’s ability to combat the Break. In a sense, Frey’s healing is the core of her hero’s journey. She saves the world, but only by confronting the recurrent scars left by the chronic trauma of her upbringing.   

The surviving people of Athia experience a different form of trauma, more classically related to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In less than one generation, their entire world fell apart and their leaders turned against them. They had to fend for themselves to survive. They banded together as refugees against the onslaught of the Break––nearly the entire population lost their homes, families, and livelihoods. The Break spread from the coasts inward, pushing the surviving population to their last, central city. As the Break slowly encroached on society’s last home, they faced the potential for death with every passing day. Their fight-or-flight system could never shut off. The chronic, inescapable trauma wore on their minds, manifesting as complex PTSD for most––if not all––of the population. It re-shaped their worldview, affecting their relationships with themselves, with each other, and with their world. Despite Frey’s deus-ex-machina-esque appearance and resolution of the world’s conflict, the people must confront the terrors from their pasts to restore Athia. In this way, the populace of Forspoken embody chronic societal trauma.  

Finally, the Tantas. Over the course of the game, you learn that these rulers had made a major sacrifice––they had to contain the power of an evil entity, a demon summoned by an enemy nation to destroy Athia. The Tantas defeated the demon and contained it, but the process of doing this split their attention, and, more importantly, the incessant voice of the entity in their heads poisoned their minds. The entity’s whispers forced the Tantas’ magic to run wild and uncontrolled, ultimately causing the Break. The Tantas’ trauma is thus twofold: the constant attacks on their consciousness by the entity, and the constant moral injury engendered by their actions. They sought to protect their people from the imminent threat of the entity but, in so doing, caused irreparable harm as this burden drove them to break from reality. Through these repeated traumas, the Tantas developed psychosis. This did not occur immediately. Rather, it took years of psychological trauma to culminate in their psychotic breaks, which was the ultimate goal of the entity. Just like the previous two examples, the Tantas could not escape. Only through their defeat by Frey could they find redemption and release.  

As I hope these examples have demonstrated, trauma permeates Forspoken. This is not an uncommon motif in role-playing games; however, most games focus on singular traumatic events, more in the realm of classic PTSD. Forspoken shifts focus to the chronicity of trauma, highlighting the multi-faceted ways that trauma can occur. To the player, the trauma is understandable––if delivered in a stilted narrative at times––and allows for exploration of this concept in the safety of a magical world. Unlike the characters in the game, the player is empowered with the means of fighting against it, thus highlighting a critical element of trauma that leads to morbidity: the feeling of powerlessness.  

To the astute player, Forspoken is as much a psychological case study as it is an enjoyable way to pass the time. You zoom around the map with fantastical power and control, all the while healing a trauma-scarred world and people. Forspoken comments on the richness of the human experience and is, without a doubt, a prime example of video games’ place as a health humanity.  

The narrator in this three-stanza poem observes men in a mental hospital who suffer from what at the time (World War I) was called shell shock and now might be labeled post-traumatic stress disorder. In any case, they are insane; they relive the “batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles.”

For these tortured souls, “sunlight seems a bloodsmear” and “dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.” They cannot escape their hideous memories of the warfare. The narrator sees them as living in hell, and he accepts for all society the blame for what has happened to them–we, he says, have “dealt them war and madness.”

Wilfred Owen is recognized as the master poet of the First World War. Writing from firsthand experiences, both in combat and in a hospital recovering from battle fatigue, Owen gave us image after image of how horrible this war was — how the idealized notions of heroism and manly valor meant next to nothing when one was trying to survive gas attacks and bombs dropped from planes. Owen was killed a week before the armistice.

In this poem he opens with a series of questions about who these mental cases are, why they rock back and forth in some kind of purgatory, why they are so tortured with panic and misery. In the second stanza, he answers the opening questions: these are the men whose minds have been ruined by their war experiences, for whom the grotesque carnage of the war was “rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.”

In the final stanza, he explains why these men are so tortured by their memories. And, typical of Owen, he points out that everyone who supported the war contributed to the madness of these mental cases.

📖 Read the poem

The Poems of Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Edition: 1986
Editors: Jon Stallworthy
Place Published: New York

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).
Web image created by Medhum.org

The Eye in the Door, the second in the trilogy, turns its attention to the Home Front, and more specifically describes the rampant paranoia during the war, as the government targets two groups:  homosexuals and “conchies,” or conscientious objectors.  While it too is tethered to historical fact, it is more of a fictional narrative concentrating on the state-sponsored witch-hunt, refracted through the story of Billy Prior, a patient of Dr. Rivers.  Billy is bisexual; he also grew up with childhood friends who became pacifists and objectors, and who may or may not have been involved in a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister, and so he moves in both of these marginalized and persecuted worlds.  He also has fallen in love with a woman whom he wants to marry.  During his ongoing treatment of Billy, Rivers confronts his own repressed childhood memories.   

The Regeneration Trilogy has much to recommend it in considering works of literature in the area of medical humanities.  First—and obviously—it is about the psychological damage suffered by young men pressed into military service during wartime, and the way in which medicine approaches their resultant illness with the tools it has at hand.  Each one of these soldiers has a story, each one has a trauma, and there are no pharmacological options. Much like Freud (a contemporary whose work was well-known to him), Rivers felt that the way to treat the shell-shocked soldiers was a “talking cure,” making the traumatic events unrepressed and having the patients recognize and address them.  The stories of the soldiers’ treatments are engaging, Rivers’ warmth and compassion for his charges is unmistakable, and the nature of physician-patient interaction during treatment is explored.   

Barker also poses questions about gender; more specifically, about the nature of manhood and the role of women in a male-dominated society turned upside down by a cataclysm.  Being a man in England during the war means being in uniform and preferably fighting in France; the conchies and the gay men are seen by many, including many women, as being “less than” men, and in their otherness, as subversive.  Women, for their part, have had to step up and assume the roles in the workforce that men have vacated to go off to fight.   It is supposedly the love of their fellow men that allows the soldiers to fight as a unit, to want to enlist and to want to re-up after they are wounded, and this comradeship is trumpeted by those in command.  But it is crucial that everyone understand that this must be the right kind of love; the wrong kind of love is ferreted out and made example of. 

There are many paradoxes, and many instances of doubling or of opposites, in the novels.  Rivers wants to cure his patients, although curing them will render them fit to be sent back to combat and likely be killed.  Several bisexual men lead bifurcated lives.  And underlying all of it is a society rigidly divided along class lines, with the WC’s—the working classes—distinguished not only by their living and working conditions but also by the idiomatic speech put into their mouths by the author.   The war may be in some ways a great “we’re all in this together” moment, but it can’t erase class distinctions.   

It is worth noting that Barker’s style can range over to the gritty and realistic, as well as the graphic, whether describing the events occurring on a battlefield in Picardy or in a bedroom (or back alley) in London. The writing style is crisp, and the narrative moves along nicely.  The author’s characterizations are on point, especially William Rivers and Billy Prior.  Barker has a great feel for language, although some of the words and expressions several of the characters use are distinctly British and may be unfamiliar to American ears.  She conveys an England—or at least, a segment of England—tired of war, tired of being bombed, often living hand to mouth in cold water flats with faded wallpaper and trying gamely to carry on despite being ground down. 

And underlying it all, The Great War—its idealization, its senselessness.  The three volumes of this trilogy are beautifully written, hold the attention, and move quickly, and its relatively spare language has a lot to say. 

The Eye in the Door
Pat Barker 
Dutton: 1994, 288 pages 

Photo of Chester from  The Cleveland Museum of Art 

Cortney Davis: The poems in Blinded Birds are startling and sometimes difficult to read. Can you talk about the process of writing such personal poems–how you considered the idea of “truth” in poetry as you were writing? 

B. Fulton Jennes: The poems in Blinded Birds are 100% autobiographical. One of the book’s reviewers called them “brutally honest,” and many people have told me they needed to stop reading to compose themselves before continuing (I guess that’s a compliment!). The intent was not to shock but, rather, to heal. For me, the only path to that healing was complete, unfiltered honesty. As we say in the program, you’re only as sick as your secrets, and I’d been holding in those poisonous secrets for far too long. Poet Anne Carson might insist that art is not therapy, but it was for me in writing these poems.  

CD:  Blinded Birds is your first poetry collection, but you’ve been writing award winning poems for some time. When did you begin your journey as a poet? 

BFJ: When I was a child my grandmother used to read to me from my father’s copy of A Child’s Garden of Verse; I loved the rhymes and the musicality of the poems. Also, my mom wanted to be a writer when she was in high school. She used to write poems with me in the morning before I went to school. Of course, I took all the credit for them with my teacher! 

CD:  And now you’re writing poems that are like explosions on the page, visceral and stripped-bare. How did you come to write these particular poems? Was there a triggering event? 

BFJ: It was after we discovered my daughter Mallory’s heroin addiction. Mal was home from college and preparing to begin overseas graduate studies when we found her overdosed and, essentially, dead on her bedroom floor. Fortunately, I was able to resuscitate her until the EMTs arrived, so she lived and entered a residential treatment program. But processing all that happened in the months that followed–including Mallory’s subsequent relapse and years of active addiction–threw both my husband and me into a state of perpetual PTSD. It also evoked memories of my own addiction to alcohol, including during Mal’s infancy (I relapsed when her pediatrician advised me to drink beer because my milk production insufficient and she was losing weight. I’m an addict–who was I to argue?). Additionally, she and I have both been treated for depression since childhood (I was on Valium when I was 12, for God’s sake–and Mallory’s depression manifested much earlier), and my mother suffered from horrible depression, most likely untreated bipolar disorder, throughout my childhood. So all of those factors congealed during this period–the memories, the fears, the regrets, the anger, the sorrow. The only way I could manage was to write my way through. 

CD:  Writing the poems must have been an extraordinary experience. Your poems about saving Mallory’s life (“Eating Dinner, After You Died,” “The Waitings”) begin in despair and end in hope. You might have kept these poems to yourself but chose to offer them publically in a collection. How did the publication of this book affect you emotionally and how have the poems affected your family?  

BFJ:  Let’s start with my family, first and foremost my daughter since she is a central character in the collection’s story arc. By the time I was ready to submit Blinded Birds to publishers, Mallory was in relatively long-term recovery–in fact, she had gone to graduate school to become a certified addictions counselor. I would never have published the poems without her permission, and she readily gave it, realizing not only the personal importance of telling our story but also the potential of connecting with others and offering them hope as a result since the final poems in the collection celebrate our joint recovery. Sadly, my mother–the third central character in the book–never achieved relief from her depression before she died. She was of a generation that clung to the belief that depression is a character flaw, not a treatable medical condition–much as addiction is still shrouded in stigma today. My husband was behind the book 100%. The rest of the family, including many who never realized our ongoing struggles with mental illness, were initially shocked but ultimately supportive. We got a lot of, “I’m so sorry–I never knew,” which just shows how well we hid the truth for so long.  

How did the book’s publication affect me emotionally? I think both Mallory and I feel really empowered by having the truth out in the open for others to learn from and, perhaps, glean hope from. Every time I finish a reading, people from the audience approach me to share their stories, especially ones about their own children who suffered, or suffer, from addiction. I can feel the healing they’ve received from knowing they’re not alone. It’s therapeutic for all of us–the giver and the receivers of hope. 

CD: Your poems seem to be “spot on” in examining the cultural and societal issues so many families struggle with today. It has been said that the personal is universal, and your very personal poems speak directly to these issues. Was that something you considered when writing, that your work might help others understand the genesis and effects of addiction? 

BFJ:  It’s only in studying how others react to the poems that I’ve developed a keener awareness of society’s misevaluation of addiction and addicts. However, while drafting the poems, I definitely took a “genetics as culprit” approach. The three of us recently had genetic testing done, which revealed that both Mallory and I have the A1 allele. In study after study, that mutation on the brain’s dopamine receptors has been very closely linked to early-onset depression, severe alcoholism, ADHD, intractable PTSD, and a heightened risk for addiction to opioids. There are two poems at the beginning of the book that highlight the fury I feel at being a victim of genetics: “Blinded Birds” and “To an Allele.” And I wish I could have shared those findings with my mother who no doubt blamed herself rather than her genetic inheritance for her lifelong depression. (Her father was severely alcoholic and despondent; two of her siblings committed suicide.) 

CD: When you understood the genetic component of depression and addiction did you feel relieved somehow of guilt or blame? I very much admire your poem “Triple Helix” that helps you “pry apart the DNA / that twists our fates together . . . .” 

BFJ:  Vindicated, perhaps, but not guiltless. There’s another poem in the book titled “Every Bad Thing That Ever Happened to Me Happened When I Was Drunk,” and that’s pretty much the truth of it. And not just the bad things that happened to me, but the bad things I imposed upon others, most notably my daughter. I relapsed twice during her childhood: once when she was an infant (the poem “Alky Mommy” speaks to that) and again when she was a teen–the two most impressionable periods in a child’s development. During those times, I was unavailable to Mallory on many levels. That’s why there’s so much regret and sorrow mixed with anger in discovering the genetic connection to addiction–my genes might have opened the door for me, but I’m the one who wrecked the room. 

CD: Yet you did not leave the room in shambles. The last several poems in Blinded Birds speak to healing and resolution. In the book’s last poem, “Hovenweep,” you write “And then you, a damaged daughter, saved me. / And then I, a mother damned, saved you.” Do you have a favorite poem among those that bring the book to a close with hope?   

BFJ: Yes! My favorite is “Return,” the second-to-last poem in the collection. I still connect to it, feel its power, whenever I read it. In it, I metaphorically compare recovery to a tree reawakening after a long winter, a long night. Isn’t that exactly what it feels like, the first time you wake up and don’t ache for a drink or a fix? You feel alive again. It’s remarkable. Like being reborn. 

CD: You often give well attended readings. Is it difficult for you to share such emotional and revealing poems?  

BFJ: Not at all. As I’ve mentioned, I can feel the healing that’s happening in the room–both for me and for those in attendance. Sure, there are some who can’t scurry away quickly enough after the reading (!), but I tell myself that they’re the ones who most needed to hear the poems. 

CD: Yes, sometimes we experience something–a poem that cuts too close perhaps–and it’s often only later that we realize how we’ve been touched, been changed. Has writing Blinded Birds changed you or your family in any way?    

BFJ: Personally, I’ve gained confidence on many levels since the book’s publication–as a poet, as a public speaker, as a truth-teller and giver of hope. I’m unafraid–unlike all those years I felt hidden and hurt by the truth. I think everyone in the family feels pretty much the same. 

CD: Once in a lecture years ago at NYU the poet Yehuda Amichai said that in war, poems can’t save us. Do you think poetry can save us? Can it bring about changes in our society?   

BFJ: It certainly has saved me on more than one occasion. So on a personal level, absolutely: poetry saves. But I see the powerful poems being written about the atrocities occurring in so many places today, and while those poems have impacted my sense of urgency and compassion, I don’t see that power playing out on a political level. I think the effect of art–whether poetry, song, or visual art–is limited to moving a pre-disposed audience. Sadly, they “preach to the choir”–albeit powerful and affective preaching. 

CD: And now that Blinded Birds has found wide readership, tell me about your latest book. You’ve written again about your family, but this time about a special and specific person. 

BFJ: Yes–FLOWN (Porkbelly Press, 2024) is an elegy-in-verse for my late sister, who died of metastatic breast cancer in July of 2022. It’s a chapbook of very short poems, written during the final months of Harriet’s illness and the days and weeks just after her passing. It’s raw, very raw. I still relive the anguish of those days when I read the poems. 

CD: how was writing this book different from—or similar to—writing Blinded Birds? 

BFJ: In terms of differences, the biggest one was that FLOWN was written while the events were transpiring, rather than in retrospect. It was a period of deep recollection and reflection, sussing–intuiting really–the metaphoric connections between Harriet’s illness (which we knew from the first diagnosis was terminal) and events from our childhood. There were four years between us, so I learned a great deal from her when we were young, just as she taught me so much about life and about the process of dying with her illness and eventual passing. 

Both books are rich in symbolism, which I guess was the greatest similarity in writing them. The title and title poem of Blinded Birds reference the old Flemish tradition of vinkensport, in which chaffinches being trained to compete in contests that require them to repeat their distinctive song the most times per hour were once blinded with hot needles to minimize distraction during competition. Cruel, right? I used that analogy to illustrate the cruelty of genetics in predetermining our propensity for addiction–and, yes, of any god who would create genetic mutations in the first place and use them for his “sport.” That metaphor echoes through the poems, just as the symbols of holes (including graves) and birds make repeated appearances throughout FLOWN.  

CD:  And one question about your poetic process. Do you have any special inspirations or habits that help you create? Sharon Olds once said that she finds inspiration in walking across water. Some poets have elaborate pre-writing rituals, or must have silence, or can only write at a table at Starbucks.   

BFJ:  For me, it’s hard to find a place quiet enough to write, to achieve that feeling of being completely removed from the world. So I usually draft my poems wearing headphones and listening to either Philip Glass or to theta wave-inducing music online. Both are very hypnotic for me and allow me to reach my Zen place.  

CD:  As one of your fans, I’m grateful for the words and images that arise from your Zen place! Finally, is there a message or a realization that you hope readers will take away after reading Blinded Birds?  

BFJ: First, addiction and depression are genetic “gifts” that no one asks to receive. They are treatable conditions, deserving of society’s and the medical community’s non-judgmental compassion and support, not its dismissal and neglect. Second, there is always, always hope. The path to recovery is fraught with physical and mental anguish, blame-placing, and failure, but keep going. Keep going. Keep going. And help others on their path, too.  

B. Fulton Jennes is Poet Laureate Emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she also served for many years as poet-in-residence at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Her poems have appeared in CALYX, Comstock Review, Extreme Sonnets II, Rust and Moth, SWWIM, Tupelo Quarterly, and many other journals and anthologies. Jennes’ poem “Glyphs of a Gentle Going” was awarded the 2022 Lascaux Prize; another poem, “Father to Son,” won the 2023 New Millennium Award. In 2021, her poem “From the Room of an Unknown Girl” was awarded the Leslie McGrath Prize. Jennes’ first collection of poems, Blinded Birds (Finishing Line Press), received the 2022 International Book Award for a poetry chapbook. Another chapbook, FLOWN—an elegy for her late sister—will be published by Porkbelly Press in 2024. She lives in Ridgefield with husband Chuck.