Unmeaningable

Roxanna Bennett

• Publisher: Gordon Hill Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781928171768
• eBook ISBN: 9781928171843
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2020 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the 2020 Raymond Souster Award, Unmeaningable welcomes you to the freak show, where the monster on display is a culture that stigmatizes sickness and a system that shames the sufferer. Behold the wonder of the ages, a human mind in a human body, dissected and displayed for entertainment. Witness the ritual of surgical sacrifice! Observe the indignity of institutionalization! Be astounded by the indifference of ableism and ignorance! This uncanny collection of "crippled" sonnets features a thrilling display of cannibals, chimeras, and the crucial question: What meaning can be made of a life lived in pain and isolation?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• The Trick
• Bag of Holding
• Waiting List
• Waiting Room
• My Toad Oracle
• Tree-Women, Delightful Forbidden Fruit
• Empirical Evidence
• The Devil’s Ritual
• Curse of the Hyacinth
• Hyacinth Waits
• Code of Conduct
• Language of Pain
• Malady
• Hour of Rat
• Shadow Gallery
• Wishes for Strangers
• Blue Rose
• Clockwhore Sings
• Language of Hospital
• Aphagia
• The Omniscient Physician Who Removes Every Pain
• Bitch
• Sire
• Rabbit Hole
• Viscera
• Litter
• Lazybone’s Lament
• Space Invaders
• Ailment
• Star Follows Tower After Catastrophe
• transMutable, Beautiful
• June, Swarm of the Songbees
• Leave You Not To The Moths
• Cure for Flightlessness
• Orison of the Wormmother
• Migratory Patterns of the Common Cripple
• Breathbirds
• Unseen Garden
• Waiting Room IX
• Intake Questionnaire
• Abdication of the Sick Queen
• Mandrake the Magician
• “Field Kabuki”
• Eat the Rude
• Orison of the Dogmother
• A Great Becoming
• Typhoid & Swans
• The Hermit Holds Up Her Lantern
• Empress of Cups
• Pan’s Labyrinth
• Recovery Narrative
• House of Psychotic Women
• Comfortchurch
• The Reflecting Skin
• Feast for the Yellow King
• Gathering Mandrakes
• Naked Lunch
• Black Sunday
• Dystonic Storm
• Progression of the Disorder
• Scales & Ladders
• Neo Orphan
• Rat Race
• “Know My Son That Our Wound is Animal-Like”
• Code White
• The Horologist Contemplates the Cuckoo Clock
• Best Wishes
• Let’s Talk
• In a Nutshell
• Clinician’s Notes II
• Initiation of the Supplicant
• Slow Drop Down a Deep Well
• “Puncture of the Body as Divine Healing”
• Birds & Breath
• “{(Our Lady of Sickbag)}”
• “mother as the embodiment of an ancient woman”
• In Spring The Skull Holes Fill w Flowers
• “The Lantern & The Ornate Eye”
• The Last of the Iron Lungs
• Unsustainable Blue Does Not Occur in Nature
• Notes and acknowledgments
• Sources and Selected Reference Material
• About the Author