I’m re-reading Sugarblood by Liz Bowen. It’s a gift of a book, a core text in my sick lit lineage that resonates in terms of both style and content. Bowen is a brilliant poet of the body, mind, and heart. Reading Sugarblood felt like finding secret staircases to all the towers of thought and feeling I had sensed but not yet accessed. (Clearly I am also re-reading Harry Potter.)
From Bowen’s poem “no small things”:
how can a woman tell
when her sex becomes hideous
is it in the shift
from caring
to needing care
She asks bold questions about care and gender and illness, and I love the ways her poems move.
Other books on my desk: I have to live by Aisha Sasha John, Renaissance Normcore by Adèle Barclay, Women in Public by Elaine Kahn, An Honest Woman by Jónína Kirton. I had Eileen Myles’ newest book, Evolution, out of the library but had to return it.
I often wish I could read more, but I’m also aware of how much pressure people feel to always be reading/consuming/thinking/processing the external. There’s a taint of ableism in such expectations. I’ve had difficulty reading, have been unable to read for periods of time, and wrote a lot of my book when I couldn’t read. And I just want to say, it’s okay not to read. It really is.
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