camera indomita

camera indomita is a poetry chapbook exploring queerness, borderline personality disorder, alcoholism, and post-traumatic stress disorder through the framework of photography and coming of age in an art school environment. The ninth chapbook and eleventh book of poetry by photographer, artist, and writer nat raum, these poems further the author’s long-term poetic reckonings with recklessness and investigations of intimacy from a trauma-informed perspective. Through forms experimental and familiar, this book excises memories with surgical precision, shedding a flickering strobe on life behind (and in front of) the lens.

“nat raum quotes Roland Barthes, ‘the photographer makes permanent the truth,’ but the poet’s own words are more confessional still—they merely ‘moonlight as truth-teller.’ In waking hours, their snapshots prefer to collect scars, trauma and sharpies and rum forming raum’s mixed-media exhibits of existence. camera indomita tells a version of a truth, but what its creator professes is a dissertation: the semiotics of self-flagellation.” —Andrew Daugherty, Editor of Black Flask

“nat raum’s camera indomita reads like a self-described dumpsterfire disaster sharpened by tarsmoke in february twilight. the poems are best viewed through the blank, unflinching void of an aperture as the image comes into focus: an intimate portrait of truths and trauma that make up personhood. raum solarizes memories for self-consumption only, captured similarly to the tone of lorde’s melodrama and pure heroine.” —tommy wyatt blake, author of NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL HORROR! and So, Who’s Courage?