Dead Grandmas Are Universal - Paperback

by Marissa Laporte (Author)

Dead Grandmas Are Universal is a raw, intimate poetry collection that traces the emotional inheritance of trauma, grief, queerness, mental illness, and survival through the lens of womanhood. Across deeply confessional free verse poems, the author explores complicated legacies passed down through generations of women: addiction, abuse, self-destruction, resilience, and the desperate longing to be loved without disappearing in the process.

Beginning with the death of LaPorte's grandmother, the collection moves through memories of fractured family dynamics, emotionally absent parents, abusive relationships, psychiatric struggles, sapphic desire, and the slow, uneven process of healing.

LaPorte's poems balance stark vulnerability with vivid imagery-swamps, marshes, barbed wire, fire, flowers, celestial bodies, and decay recur throughout the manuscript as symbols of both destruction and rebirth.

The collection is sharply contemporary, weaving together references to antidepressants, therapy, queer identity, internet-age loneliness, and Midwestern life with lyrical meditations on mortality and connection. While many poems inhabit despair, the manuscript ultimately bends toward endurance: reclaiming identity, building chosen family, and learning to live beyond inherited pain.

Dead Grandmas Are Universal speaks to readers who have wrestled with grief, generational trauma, mental illness, and the complicated act of becoming whole.