In her book, Doctors’ Stories, Montgomery Hunter discusses the pervasiveness of narratives (e.g., diagnosis, cases study, rounds) in informing not only the medical encounter, but also medicine as an institution: “Patients’ stories within medicine are more or less pared-down autobiographical accounts that chronicle the events of illness and sketch out a commonsense etiology. . ….
Tag: poetry
“If Nothing” by Matthew Nienow – An Alphabetical Review
An Alphabetical Review of “If Nothing” by poet Matthew Nienow (Alice James Books, 2025)
Reducing Creativity to a Psychiatric Syndrome: On the Pathologization of Female Poets
October 17th, 2024. Public reading of my latest collection of poems, Permettez-moi de palpiter [Allow Me to Pulsate][3]. Open discussion with the audience. […] Suddenly, in a eureka moment, an elderly man speaks up: “You have Cotard’s syndrome. You must have. All the symptoms you describe match up.” This anecdote – whose significance is, in fact, more than anecdotal – gives me the opportunity to revisit a centuries-old tradition in patriarchal discourse of pathologizing female poets.
Giving Us A Line: Chaos, Illness, and Max Ritvo’s “The Senses.”
For some time now, I’ve been thinking about the limitations of the chaos narrative as it relates to illness illustrated in Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller. I’ve looked at how favoring alternate narrative structures over the traditional arc might lead to meaning-making of these so-called anti-narratives. Furthering the idea that we can give chaos…
Anti And Alt Narratives: Illness and Chaos
Illness is an interruption to the story of the self. As a narrative species, we often understand our day-to-day lives in terms of story, but with the onset, diagnosis, and treatment of illness, the disruption of those stories can easily fall into what Arthur Frank calls “the chaos narrative” in his seminal book, The Wounded…
Sensitive Immersions in Medical Institutions: The French Contemporary Playwright as a Witness to Care, Vulnerability and Precariousness
There is something theatrical about medicine. And there is something medical about theater. It should come as no surprise, then, to observe a very strong trend in the French theatrical landscape, that consists in linking playwrights with medical institutions through what is called immersions programs. But this trend is too significant not to question it.
Review: Standing in the Forest of Being Alive
When Katie Farris’s Standing in the Forest of Being Alive was published by Alice James Press last year, I couldn’t put it down—and after I finished reading through it, I didn’t want to put it down. I kept it in my car as I drove to the National Institutes of Health for a bioethics fellowship;…
To Our Dearly Departed: Intimacy and Grief
As a poet, writing a poem is one of my ways of being in the world, and certainly one of my most effective ways of dealing with complicated emotions. My brother died of metastatic colorectal cancer in early June 2019. Since his death, I have charted time in terms of his death: there is before…
Chinatown Poem
— “Chinatown Poem” is a cento poem written using language taken from billboards, commercial shop signs, advertisements, and other elements of the linguistic landscape of Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood. The poem explores Chinatown as both a site of diasporic cultural production and a space where racist tropes and stereotypes about Asian people circulate and…
“To Break into Pieces” – Puncturing and Preserving the Feminine Self in Leila Chatti’s Deluge (2020)
“To Break into Pieces” – Puncturing and Preserving the Feminine Self in Leila Chatti’s Deluge (2020) The medical root “-rrhagia” at the end of a term signifies an urgent and abnormal rupture accompanied by a shocking burst of liquid, as in hemorrhage (blood loss from a damaged vessel), menorrhagia (excessive menstrual bleeding), or metrorrhagia…