A challenging exploration of mental illness and disability from Governor General’s Award winner Jacob Scheier.
Is This Scary? digs deep into internal landscapes of suffering, including depression and anxiety, chronic physical ailment, and rare neurological malady. With its many eccentric songs and odes to medications and medical procedures, this book is full of both levity and unapologetic lament. Pushing back against societal stigma, Is This Scary? unflinchingly addresses experiences of psychiatric institutionalization and suicidality, without either romanticizing or pathologizing them. Scheier rejects much of the mainstream cultural views of mental illness, subverting the biochemical model by emphasizing the radical subjectivity of mental suffering. While the poems render the difficulty of communicating pain to others, they defiantly celebrate its expression and evocation through visceral lyricism.
Scheier also challenges our culture’s desire to be inspired by stories of “triumphing” over illness and disability. Nothing is overcome here, the journey from illness to wellness is one of narrative and aesthetic disruption. The perpetually incomplete search for self and home is ultimately at the heart of this book: along with being a person with disabilities, the poet-speaker identifies as a Diaspora-Jew, engaging exile as a chronic state of being that isn’t intended to be resolved, but rather explored, expressed, and honored.
Ode to Prednisone
Herr Pill! You murder sleep.
Eugenicist Cortisol, re-make me—
ox-strong, moon-faced, onioned-skin.
Hugs are dangerous.
Performance-enhancing drug for poets—
you triple feelings. Elegies for the late train & spilled milk.
Anxiety is Everything.
Threatened by the light that brightens the dark.
Dread tolerates Ativan.
Faustian Chemical, you resurrect myths
like Lazarus. He was never the same.
Charon-ian Steroid,
I’ve been to that shore the dead clamour for.
Authors
- Control Number Identifier
- CaOOCEL
- Description conventions
- rda
- Dewey Decimal Classification Number
- C811/.6
- Dewey Decimal Edition Number
- 23
- Distributor
- Canadian Electronic Library (Firm),
- General Note
- Issued as part of the desLibris books collection
- ISBN
- 9781773057217 1773057219 9781770416055
- LCCN
- PR9199.4.S3855
- LCCN Item number
- I7 2021eb
- Modifying agency
- CaBNVSL
- Original cataloging agency
- NLC
- Physical Description | Extent
- 1 electronic text (76 pages)
- Published in
- Ottawa, Ontario
- Publisher or Distributor Number
- CaOOCEL
- Rights
- Access restricted to authorized users and institutions
- System Control Number
- (CaBNVSL)kck00241839 (OCoLC)1203059684 (CaOOCEL)480928
- System Details Note
- Mode of access: World Wide Web
- Transcribing agency
- NLC
Table of Contents
- Front Cover 1
- Copyright 5
- Dedication 6
- Contents 8
- Dear Sam, This Isn’t a Suicide Note 10
- Palinopsia Song or Ode to Some Fucking Bird 14
- Ode to Prednisone 16
- Crohn’s Song 17
- Symptoms Include a Compulsive Desire to be Understood 19
- Poem for a Broken Bone 20
- Election Night in the Ward 22
- Ode to Zopiclone 25
- To My Friends Who Did Not Visit Me in the Mental Hospital 27
- Circular Labyrinth 32
- The Chestnut Tree Café 35
- Self-Parenting 37
- Noonday Yahweh 39
- Song for a Colonoscopy 41
- The Spaz 43
- To a Child Whose Mother Has Not Yet Died 44
- Song to the Suicides 46
- Note 47
- Metamorphosis 49
- Jumbo Elegy 50
- God as We Understood Him 52
- On Missing a Train Stop 54
- Songs from an Emergency Room 56
- Nearly 50% of Toronto Islands underwater after recentdeluge of rain: City 58
- In Praise of Losing Thi 61
- Ode to Remicade 63
- Infusion Song 64
- And Then Job Answered God from inside the Whirlwind TheyWere Both Caught inside Of 65
- Job’s Girlfriend 68
- Lamotrigine Song 71
- Re: hey, and i might have cancer 73
- Harold and Maude Revisited 75
- Wanting to Not Want to Die 78
- My Last Depression 79
- Notes 82
- Acknowledgements 84
- Back Cover 90