Trauma is inescapable and penetrates the human psyche. Unbidden traumatic memories are recalled repetitively, triggered by stimuli that hide within the incomprehensibility of traumatic events. The permeation of traumatic experiences leaves people fragmented and disoriented, living in, what the modernist poet T.S. Eliot would have referred to as, a wasteland of broken images.

Using literary trauma theory, poetry, and collaboration, Terriann Walling and George Gerard theorize how individuals can feel free from the penetrating power of trauma. Permeate and Penetrate is an academic, artistic, and poetic hybrid which examines the fragmented psyche of the twenty-first century individual. Wounds of trauma are examined through written personal poetic testimonies, collaborative witnessing, and are responded to by reformulation of two poems of trauma.

This book expands upon literary trauma theory in the theory of Reformulation Poetry. The foundation for reformulation poetry is primarily based on Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Judith Herman's research in the realm of literary trauma theory and psychology. The book includes poetry inserts from T.S. Eliot, Torquoto Tasso, Adrienne Rich, and original individual poems written by victims of traumatic events, as well as collaborative reformulation poems, made by two people who have experienced traumas. The book provides in-depth details about how to create poems of reformulation through a step-by-step process. Interviews from trauma victims are included giving their personal accounts of the reformulation process.

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