In the Stillness of Chaos
A Journey in Verse: Poetry of Survival, Reclamation, and Transformation
Published on 22. May 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
122 pages
978-1-300-21860-9 (ISBN)
Description
In the Stillness of Chaos is a poetic archive of survival, memory, and becoming-written from the margins of neurotypical, cisnormative, ableist expectation. With vivid tenderness and precise defiance, Jaime Hoerricks-a trans, autistic, gestalt-processing writer and educator-offers a collection shaped not by resolution, but by recursion: a rhythm of spirals, stimming, silence, and sacred return.
Across its pages, you'll find poems that map the terrain of identity not as a fixed point, but as a living, shifting landscape. Meltdowns become thresholds. Shutdowns become sacred retreats. Trans embodiment becomes not a deviation, but an ancient, embodied grammar. Through metaphor, memory, and myth, these poems speak in the language of pebbles left for others to find-kinship offered in fragments, wholeness found in the act of witnessing.
Drawing on themes of sensory overwhelm, ancestral reclamation, systemic erasure, and autistic pattern recognition, this collection resists the linear, the clinical, and the commodified. Instead, it carves space for what cannot be measured: the quiet defiance of surviving beautifully, the poetics of feeling too much, and the courage of naming oneself on one's own terms.
Whether you are neurodivergent, queer, trans, or simply seeking language for the unspeakable, In the Stillness of Chaos is not an instruction manual or a recovery narrative-it is a cairn. A resting place. A companion for those who've had to write themselves into being because the world refused to do it for them.
This is not poetry that asks to be decoded. It asks to be felt. To be honoured. To be remembered.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Morrisville
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
189 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-300-21860-9 (9781300218609)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Jaime Hoerricks (they/she) is a trans, autistic writer, educator, and gestalt langauge processor living and working in Los Angeles, California-by way of the Stone-Borne people of the West Highlands. Their work weaves lived experience with educational practice, always with a deep regard for language as both refuge and resistance.
For readers interested in exploring more of Jaime's thinking-particularly at the intersection of neurodivergence, pedagogy, and systemic reform-you can find their ongoing work at AutSide.Substack.com. AutSide is a newsletter, reflection space, and archive of living theory-offering essays on inclusive education, neurodivergent writing practices, sensory justice, and the politics of refusal, all grounded in Jaime's lived and professional expertise.
Their academic and practitioner-oriented books include:
¿ No Place for Autism? (Lived Places Publishing) - A lived-experience exploration of autism as identity and difference, challenging deficit models and asking what it would take for places to truly make space for autistic people. Interrogates how autism is framed, advocating for structural change over individual correction-and for spaces to become places where autistic people can genuinely belong.
¿ Holistic Language Instruction - a reimagining of how we teach language through relational, sensory, and culturally sustaining practices. Addresses the reasons behind the West's terrible reading scores, and offers concrete plans to improve them.
¿ Decolonising Language Education - a call to educators to dismantle colonial structures embedded in literacy and language pedagogies.
These texts speak to parents, educators, researchers, and advocates looking for actionable insight and systemic challenge. But In the Stillness of Chaos is different. This project is personal-intimate, nonlinear, and deliberately unfiltered. It is a poetic ledger of becoming, of memory and meltdown, of reclaiming breath and body and name.
If those earlier books spoke from the lectern, this one speaks from the hillside, the fireside, the breath between shutdown and shimmer.
Jaime writes not for applause, but for resonance-for the ones who were never meant to be here, but are.
Still here. Still becoming.