You ask how I feel. This is a trap. If I say my body hurts, not in my skin or fascia but in the spreading of pain along my nerves from my mother to my daughters. If I say inside me pain learns something new: how to web into the small and wet, loiter in the old rooms of diving and blue. You will reply, I’m sorry. I’d rather argue.
Cataloguing Pain as Marriage Counseling (excerpt)
Allison Blevins
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- March 21, 2024
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“Cataloguing Pain as Marriage Counseling” (excerpt) from CATALOGUING PAIN: by Allison Blevins.
Published by YesYes Books on April 19, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Rachel Blevins.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Allison Blevins is a queer disabled writer. She is the author of Where Will We Live if the House Burns Down (Persea Books, forthcoming), winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and three other full-length collections. She is also the author of five chapbooks. Allison is the Founder and Director of Small Harbor Publishing. She lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. allisonblevins.com
Allison Blevins writes, in Cataloguing Pain, "Do you think of me as a swallowtail, a fern, a dust covered suit coat?" These questions scaffold the collection, which acts as a lyric guide for any body that finds itself awash with change. These poems ground, stun, and transport their readers into the intimacies of the bedroom, the washroom, a closet draped in metaphor. What a gift to be pulled this closely, to be invited in like this.
-Kayleb Rae Candrilli, author of Water I Won't Touch
Cataloguing Pain by Allison Blevins crips what the catalog does as a rhetorical device, meticulously capturing the intimacies of care work, which are sometimes painful, sometimes joyful in their demands of both caregiver and recipient. Care and pain are revealed to always be relational and intertwined—a series of negotiations for which no one is fully prepared.
-Travis Chi Wing Lau, author of Paring
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