Abstract

This manuscript of poems presents an experiential narrative of anorexia nervosa. Told in the first person, the speaker's passage into and through the disease is chronicled in terms that describe the physiological, emotional, behavioural, and linguistic elements at its heart. The speaker's search for meaning in her experiences is complicated by her obsessive thought patterns, degraded physical condition, and distorted subjective reality, a situation that renders seemingly direct perceptions and innocuous beliefs suspect. Her conflicting desires for self-annihilation, thinness, recovery, certainty, and some version of "health" are formally reflected in the fragmented and collagiste aspects of the manuscript's three sections. Poems addressing elements of home and family are placed in dialogue with travel poems, in which the speaker must navigate questions of aesthetic perception, cultural belief, and the possibilities of translating her own experience. A particular pressure is placed on language itself as a determinant of identity and value, as the speaker struggles to articulate a self that is separate from the disease that structures her thinking. Over the course of the manuscript, common tropes of disease as a battle or a teleological journey toward wellness are refuted, as the speaker comes to the realization that in her case, recovery is possible behaviourally, but not cognitively. The choice becomes to continue living in spite of her own perceptions of her body, and to locate meaning and identity outside of her own instinctive beliefs.