DescriptionThis manuscript, titled "Underpainting," is a collection of poems that reflect on childhood, family, war, beauty, and my own passage through girlhood as the child of a Somali father and an American mother. The poems touch upon the mythological figure of Helen of Troy, 9/11, and the way that trauma glows beneath the surface of present lived experience. Like layers of paint, suppressed experiences never truly disappear, even if partly obscured within the prism of memory. My poems grapple with self-presentation into womanhood, and the dressing down of beauty, lending another dimension to "underpainting," a term used in art books that illustrate techniques of the old masters of Renaissance painting. The brighter layers of paint flicker and cause the shadowy canvas to glow from within. Each poem in this manuscript peels away another layer of experience, dream, or reverie to lay bare some emotional truth of terrible beauty—and mystery. Like a painting, or any work of art, a memory poem is always abstract, always symbolic, yet somehow it reveals emotional truth with stark precision.