‘Those poems, six of which are published here, detail our experiences with disability and medical intervention, and the subsequent grief and isolation that such intervention creates. The project began as a series of letters between us, designed to give voice to anxieties we had once experienced alone and that, until our friendship, had gone largely unspoken. We hope that in their current form, the poems convey the buoyancy of two voices in dialogue and allow the reader an entry point into a deeply specific experience with universal resonances.
The book begins with a letter from S that details this speaker’s dream about the possible loss of her legs, an imaginary space wherein she feels finally free of the heft and weight of the years of surgery, bodily alteration and physical disability. The second speaker, M, replies with an invitation to delve into that shared psychic space. Thus begins a series of letters that situates the speakers in relationship to each other and enacts their shared struggle to locate a stable sense of self.
As the sequence develops, a collective, imagined landscape begins to take shape: The speakers find themselves caught between the desire to be at home in spaces that aren’t made for them and a desire to be lost among the wild, uncultivated landscapes — woods, rivers, canyons and fields — that more readily resemble their untamable bodies. A central paradox emerges: How can a body that can’t return to its natural form, since it has been irrevocably altered by the violence of surgery, ever be at home in the natural world? And if it can’t go home, how can an imagined home be fashioned from what resources remain?‘ More here.