Emily Bilman

Dr. Emily Bilman is a widely published and anthologized author of poetry, of literary and psychoanalytical essays, and non-fiction. She has a long-term training in psychoanalysis. Her PhD dissertation, The Psychodynamics of Poetry: Poetic Virtuality and Oedipal Sublimation in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot and Paul Valéry was published by Lambert Academic, DE in 2010. Modern Ekphrasis (2013) was published by Peter Lang Academic, CH. Her poetry books, A Woman by A Well (2015), The Threshold of Broken Waters (2018), Apperception (2020), The Undertow (2023), and Resilience (2025) were published by Troubador Books, UK. Her sonnet, “Pathfinder”, landed on the moon with a time-capsule. She teaches literature, psychoanalysis, and creative writing in Geneva and New York. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-emily-bilman-37666413

Double Bind

Rowan walked along the oak forest immersed in a conscientious dilemma. He could not decide whether he should enlist in the army to counteract war casualties in Praetorium. He had a conflict between his conscience and his ego. His ego spurred him towards self-preservation whereas his conscience urged him to enlist in the armed forces.
Rowan was a geographer and writer who lived alone in a restored stone cottage in the countryside of Nova Brescia. That year, spring was deployed like an air-inflated parachute on the countryside. On bright days when the mist lifted from the valley and the fields, he could hear the stream flowing along the cottage. Then, he would stop writing to listen to the stream skipping on the grit of the riverbed. The sound of the stream soothed him.

“Initiation to Flight,” “Perennity,” and “The Gauzed Interior”

Standing amid the death-censors
“You cannot succumb to Thanatos
all for all”, I said to them to ward off
their collective suicide. Unheard.