Side Effects May Include Strangers

Dominik Parisien

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780228003571
• eBook ISBN: 9780228005001
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Kanadische Poesie

Ask, Can we for a moment make of beauty / the measure of our pain? and I will answer.

To be ill is to be a body bursting with strangers. A curiosity. A narrative to interpret. Dominik Parisien's debut collection is a poignant celebration of the complicated lived experience of disability, a challenge to the societal gaze, and a bold reconfiguration of the language of pain.

A powerful contribution to the field of disability poetics, Side Effects May Include Strangers is an affecting look at the multitude of ways a body is both boundary and boundless. Parisien takes bpNichol's claim that "what is a poem is inside of your body" and localizes the inner and outer lives of disabled, queer, and aging bodies as points of meaning for issues of autonomy, disability, sexuality, and language.

Balancing hope and uncertainty, anger and gratitude, these poems shift from medical practice to myth, from trauma to intergenerational friendship, in an unflinching exploration of the beauty and complexity of othered bodies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• PAIN BY ANY OTHER NAME
• LET US FOR A MOMENT CALL THIS PAIN BY OTHER WORDS
• IT IS NOT THIS
• BILINGUAL PATHWAYS
• IT IS NOT THIS (II)
• (B)RAIN WEATHER
• PICTURE BOOK
• IT IS NOT THIS?
• TO THE SADISTS & THE MASOCHISTS
• WITH APOLOGIES TO THOSE WITH CONGENITAL ANALGESIA
• UN DOCTEUR ANGLOPHONE TRADUIT LES INQUIÉTUDES DE SON PATIENT AVEC GOOGLE
• AN ENGLISH-SPEAKING DOCTOR TRANSLATES THE CONCERNS OF HIS PATIENT WITH GOOGLE
• IT IS THIS
• STRANGE(R) BODIES
• THE BODY CALLS FOR GUESTS
• CALLING A BODY A BODY
• TO A BI BODY
• WRITING AFTER TARGETED ASSAULT
• THE WALL SPELLED LOVE
• PENNY
• ABLEIST ANALYSIS
• INSIDE STORY
• WHAT YOU LEARN, DROWNING
• AFTER DECIDING NOT TO DIE BY SUICIDE, YOU SHOULD BE THINKING
• SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE STRANGERS
• OTHER BODY PRAYER
• AFTER CONVULSING IN PUBLIC
• METAMORPHOSIS
• TO A CHRONICALLY PAINED BODY
• CAN WE CALL THIS AN AUBADE
• A PORTRAIT OF THE MONSTER AS AN ARTIST
• A MASK IS NOT A FACE
• NIECE WITH A PEACH FOLLOWING FOUR MINUTES OF PLANET EARTH
• BIRTHDAY WISH
• I AM LEARNING TO FORGET
• CONCUSSION
• HEAD IN A JURY
• ARACHNOID CYST
• MRI, OR THE NEW ART OF ANTHROPOMANCY
• HOLIDAY TRAGEDY
• POST-CONVULSIVE RECOVERY
• BECOMING
• (DE)GENERATION
• CARD GAME WITH DISABLED FRIENDS
• TO AN AGED BODY
• AFTERNOON WITH GRANDPARENTS
• THE EGANVILLE HEALER’S COMPOUND
• UPKEEP
• PATIENT
• WATCH FOR THAT HORIZON
• DEGENERATION
• WORDS LIKE SAND BAGS
• I HEAR YOU IN THE BROKEN THINGS
• YOU CAME TO SAY GOODBYE AGAIN
• RELIC
• A NEW HOME
• OLD YOUNG MAN
• THE OLD MAN IN HIS ROOM, ALWAYS IN THE NUDE
• HOSPITAL TIME
• HOSPITAL VISIT
• TO A DYING FRIEND
• NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS