Review: Wallpaper Dogs by Allard Broderick by Wayfarer Magazine
There are books that ask you to witness. This is one of them.
Wallpaper Dogs arrived in my hands the way certain things do—quietly, without fanfare, and yet with the unmistakable gravity of something that matters. I didn’t read it so much as I moved through it, the way you move through a place you recognize without having been there before.
Allard Broderick writes from a system—from the many-chambered interior of a life shaped by dissociation, by childhood harm, by the long and unglamorous work of healing. They do not tidy this up for us. They do not offer the clean arc we’ve been conditioned to expect from stories of survival. What they offer instead is truer: the shards, the silences, the places where language itself breaks apart and the image must carry what words cannot.
The poems do not perform their pain. They inhabit it. “Purity” opens the collection with the image of a child navigating a dangerous home—street lights as curfew signals, peeling wallpaper, the particular vigilance of a small body that has learned the world is not safe. By the second page you understand that this book will not be protecting you from anything. And somehow, that feels like a gift.
What moved me most was the range. The collection holds, in the same breath, the devastation of “Martyrdom” and the tentative, hard-won hope of “Dare I.” It holds “Consent” alongside “Dandelion Spectacles.” It holds grief and defiance and even, occasionally, humor—the wry, unsentimental kind that only people who have truly suffered seem to earn. Broderick’s illustrations move through the same territory, the portrait work in particular carrying a rawness that language sometimes cannot reach.
I’ve sat with a lot of writing about trauma. Much of it circles the wound without entering it. Wallpaper Dogs enters it. And then, not easily, not neatly, it finds its way toward something luminous. Not healing in the resolved sense. Not arrival. But the stubborn, extraordinary act of continuing.
This book is for those who know what it is to survive in a world that preferred your silence. It is also for those willing to be changed by what they read. Both groups will find something irreplaceable here.
