Touching the Landscape Within

Touching the Landscape Within

In an extraordinary collection of poetry, Deborah Alston Wroblewski tells how she became lost and then found due to a mistake, an oversight, probably by a well-meaning doctor, that determined the course of her life. Even at seventy-two, she still struggled to transcend and understand this early trauma of congenital hip dysplasia discovered too late. As a two-year-old, Wroblewski knew something was very wrong. Her small body was encased in a plaster cast that extended from armpits to ankles. She quickly learned about pain, imprisonment, separation, ridicule, and soldiering on. Her confinement lasted one year, but didn't end there. This condition deeply affected her mother, father and brother, along with all the people who would come to love her. She carried these inner and outer wounds, along with their effects, and they influenced every decision she would make in her life. She became the girl with the odd gait, the disability, which then defined her. The poems in Touching the Landscape Within weave together her story and her ultimate healing and self-acceptance. "In spare, koan-like poems of 'holy curiosity, ' Deborah Alston Wroblewski 'looks back / to move forward' in Touching the Landscape Within , mapping her path to reclaiming not only a self but a marriage after a life marred by the pain of a congenital issue that set her apart from the age of two. 'Why me?' becomes 'thank you' as Wroblewski discovers that the 'gift / called self worth / shifts everything into / balance.'" - Tania Pryputniewicz, author of the poetry collections The Fool in the Corn and November Butterfly, both by Saddle Road Press "Deborah Alston Wroblewski's debut book of poetry, Touching the Landscape Within, takes the reader on an unveiled journey centered around a singular moment accompanying birth. From here we are invited into the poet's unseen levels of imprisonment-from being in a cast at age two to address a late diagnosis congenital hip dysplasia to its long-term impacts to self, soothed by understanding or further wounded by barriers within society. Then, like the power of a poetic turn, Wroblewski shows us what it is to claim self-worth and embrace our lives, beautiful and broken at the same time, while stewarding its bright flame. This is captured in the lines, 'With age we understand the delicate balance of mourn and savor, seeing ourselves fading while fanning the flame.' " - Shauna Potocky, author of Sea Smoke, Spindrift and Other Spells (2025) and Yosemite Dawning, Poems of the Sierra Nevada (2023) both by Cirque Press Deborah Alston Wroblewski is a former nurse. She is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of eleven, art teacher, artist, writer and poet whose work explores resilience, pain, love, endurance and the beauty of imperfection. Her medical condition shaped her life, her art, and soul but no longer defines her. She gives voice to all women's struggles with body image, marriage, losing one's self, perfectionism, forgiveness, and acceptance. Her memoir in poems seeks to unleash the quiet voice of the silenced woman, the everywoman. She lives in Santa Barbara, California, a long way from her Philadelphia roots, with her husband, Edmund, and cat, Gus, in an old Tudor house near her adult children and many grandchildren. She no longer carries her threadbare security blanket of anger.