Click cover to download ROOM 2.24 or previous issues

Poems Photo by Sabian Symbols

To Sing in the Presence of Quaking by Diane Raptosh

Diane Raptosh teaches creative writing and co-directs the program in Criminal Justice/Prison Studies at the College of Idaho. Her eighth book, Hand Signs from Eternity’s Yurt, was published by Kelsay Books in June 2022.  Her collection American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press)…

Read more
Community Projects

Passage

Passage is an interdisciplinary call-and-response poetry, music, and prose project inspired by grief and created at the height of the pandemic. The project hinges around a single poem written by poet, scholar, and psychoanalyst Forrest Hamer, PhD. Dr. Hamer sent…

Read more
Responses

Reader Response: David Lotto

As Thrul suggests, the end of history thesis fits well with the rise of the biological deterministic model for understanding mental distress. The widespread adoption of this paradigm in the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic communities has much to do with the…

Read more
Editorials

Social Dreaming by Hattie Myers

There is a “deep and somber unity” when the different impressions of our senses enter into “correspondence.” So writes the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his seminal book The Poetics of Space. It is this “correspondence” that allows us to receive…

Read more
Art

Grace Bakst Wapner

Grace Bakst Wapner’s work with urethane or satin, clay or bronze, chiffon or pipe cleaners in an interactive dialogue between material and object has been determinative in her process. In the early 1970s she erected walls and barriers constructed from satin…

Read more
Essays

Feeding by Roa Harb

It begins when any one of us living abroad confirms dates for a visit. My mother starts asking weeks in advance for our favorite foods so that she can core, stuff, mince, chop, and knead her way into neatly packed…

Read more
Poems

RATATOUILLE: Sonnet for Shelly Bach by Eugene Mahon

Eugene Mahon, MD, is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. He has published four books—Such Stuff as Dreams, A Psychoanalytic Odyssey, Rensal the Redbit, and Bone Shop of the Heart—and numerous articles on…

Read more
Poems

Fire by Terri Greco

Terri Greco’s poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, North Carolina Literary Review, San Pedro River Review, Jacar Press, and Main Street Rag. She was the recipient of a James Applewhite Poetry Prize (Honorable Mention, 2020) and an honorable mention…

Read more
Essays

Ghosts in the Bathhouse by Kevin Barrett

…The work on transgenerational transmission and healing of trauma has been focused on familial ties and attachment experiences. In the case of gay men, the generations are linked through an identity that isn’t familial. Thirty years beyond the worst of…

Read more
Essays

The Comfort of Fake News by Isaac Tylim

The following vignette attempts to illustrate how the culture of fake news seemed to have invaded the sanctity of the therapeutic setting. One may argue that the underlying motivations for this invasion are multi-determined. No single interpretation could embrace what…

Read more
Poems

Skiffieworlds by Joanne Brooks

Joanne Brooks is a psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, a member of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, and head of professional practice for the British Psychoanalytic Council. Based in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she has an independent practice, she is a training therapist…

Read more