I am altered, terminal, skeletal.The hours blunt me, dine on myhead. Sign a formacknowledging you understand the risks thaterase you. Euphoriais released slowly into the blood,severe and unpredictable, paralyzing my open heart. Death is patient, monitoring the muscles of respiration, neck, eye, and eyelash.The brain is shivering in human milk.The brain saysmanufacturelight.Dreamsdecrease theurge to breatheand end with wire cutters tearing along the perforations, pink side facing up. You may feel dizzy, sleepy, minty, a gentle bubbling feeling, until you completely dissolve.
[I am altered, terminal, skeletal]
—from the Fentanyl package insert and Medline Plus drug information
Feature Date
- June 27, 2024
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“[I am altered, terminal, skeletal]” from The Animal is Chemical © 2024 by Hadara Bar-Nadav. Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
Jonny Ulasien
Hadara Bar-Nadav is an NEA fellow and award-winning author of several books of poetry, among them The Animal Is Chemical, The New Nudity, Lullaby (with Exit Sign), The Frame Called Ruin, and others. She is also co-author with Michelle Boisseau of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. Hadara is a Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
The Animal Is Chemical is a book about the body and the mind-their response to illness and their rejection of, or dependence on, all we do to medicate what we cannot bear to feel. But it also seems to me an extended ars poetica that questions-and prays for!-poetry’s ability to heal: “The old wound is speaking / again through my back, / carving its blood alphabet.” Hadara Bar-Nadav organizes terror through a language so precise that every line proves how beauty can be wrought from pain.
—Jericho Brown, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and Judge of the 2022 Levis Prize in Poetry
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