Health and bodies

Writing overly dramatic and just-plain-bad poetry is a surefire way of losing emotional intensity. I kept asking myself, ‘Where has my language gone?’ The answer comes in the form of a question: ‘What language?’ Even after giving oneself appropriate distance from the event – in my case the attack – how does one describe a violent spinning that lasts for hours? How does one describe severe nausea? Every time I tried to capture my symptoms in a poem it was ‘woe-is-me’, a plea for comfort, or, worse, didactic.

‘She tells me she doesn’t think the internet has changed much in the past two decades. We still chat and flirt. It’s just more widespread.’

Travel is supposed to be transformative, worldly, independent, brave. It is supposed to be a breaking free from the things that bind us to our everyday and repetitious – and by implication dull and stultifying – lives. We are supposed to value travel because of this, because it is international and not domestic, unsettling and not homely, disjunctive rather than routine. And I want these things, of course I want these things for my life and for that idea of myself as I’d like to be.

‘Tidiness isn’t just about how things might be or currently are – it’s about how things should be.’

‘Far from imagining hunger as an art of discarnation, Wright seeks to give it body, simultaneously remarking on the physicality, the sensuality of the experience, and objectifying it as something outside of herself, material enough to protect her from the world.’ Alys Moody on Fiona Wright’s Small Acts of Disappearance.

‘The addiction supplied me with a whole way of looking at the world – indeed, of being in the world: of suspicion, protection against the threat of embarrassment, pervasive guilt, the rigorous practices of prevarication: strategic concealment and sophisticated deceit, the utterly endless rehearsal of excuses.’ This is the second installment of Chris Fleming’s account of his drug addiction, and the modes, mechanics, and madness of legal and illegal drug acquisition.

‘These were, of course, not the only kinds of codes in operation, codes which – like many tacit social rules, one would learn about only when violated. The more time I spent at dealers’ houses, the more I learned that there was a hierarchy of drugs, a sort of regime of acceptability.’ This is the first installment of Chris Fleming’s account of his drug addiction, and the modes, mechanics, and madness of legal and illegal drug acquisition.

In the year that I first became ill, I recognised the physicality of Teresa’s hunger, and I carried it with me for years, although the rest of For Love Alone did not stir me – I was nineteen, and probably too callow, too cold and self-obsessed to fully understand it. But in the last two years, I started hearing so many writers talk again about Christina Stead.