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How do you write a memoir when the memories themselves are missing? This is the central question of Kerry Neville’s Momma May Be Mad, a fragmented and deeply intimate account of memory loss, motherhood, and mental illness. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Neville writes openly about her experiences with alcoholism, anorexia, self-harm, and the severe depression that eventually led to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Neville loses large portions of her past, leaving her with o

In Terminal Surreal, poet Martha Silano confronts her diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) with a collection that is at once contemplative, defiant, and unwaveringly honest. Published just months after Silano’s death, the collection’s structure traces a loose arc, beginning with the author’s first signs of illness and continuing through its progression. Yet, rather than embracing a purely linear timeline, these poems weave together moments of uncertainty and rea

Naomi Cohn’s book, titled The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight, showcases Cohn’s experience with progressive vision loss through examinations of the definitions of words, personal childhood memories, observations of art, and the history of Braille itself. These perspectives intersect in the form of an alphabetical encyclopedia, the barriers between these forms disappearing as they all prove necessary in Cohn’s journey relearning reading and writing, and emb

The experience of reading Rob Macaisa Colgate’s debut poetry collection Hardly Creatures is like moving through an art gallery—there are rooms, placards, accessibility guides, sensory rooms, and benches to pause and reflect upon the art. The white pages of this collection become the walls of the gallery and Colgate hangs his poems upon them, inviting the reader to experience the work from multiple angles by inhabiting a physical perspective, providing a stark reminder that en

Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s Exploding Head is a haunting and intimate collection of prose poetry that explores the boundary between body and mind, memory and perception. Across surreal yet deeply grounded poems, Hoffman examines embodiment, vulnerability, and the uneasy experience of living within one’s own consciousness, where angels watch the wounds that still live, and the ordinary has its own spiritual and psychological weight. Through poems that move through OCD, childhood

Ellen Samuels’ new poetry collection, Your Body Should Be a Part of the World, explores themes of chronic illness and the natural world, drifting between and blending the two. The poems weave through hospital visits, procedures, reflections of scars (both physical and emotional), and moments in the garden. Another prominent theme in this work is survival, especially the complicated emotions that arise when considering the fact that “every year [the speaker] spend[s] more days

Gabe Montesanti’s Drag Thing: A Memoir of Mania and Mirrors chronicles the author’s emergence into drag culture and her evolution into an unclassifiable, genderfluid “drag thing.” Through experimentation and performance, Montesanti confronts binary ideas about gender conformity while navigating strained relationships and personal challenges. Her search for community, stage presence, and self often butts up against–and sometimes feeds off of–a more private battle with the man

Eshani Surya’s debut novel, Ravishing , follows estranged siblings Kashmira and Nikhil as they fall into the clutches of a dystopian beauty industry after the abandonment of their abusive father. Speculative and vulnerable, the novel explores Indian American identity, queerness, the body, chronic illness, girlhood, and friendship. In this interview, Mialise Carney and Eshani Surya discuss writing invisible illness, the beauty industry, and making the familiar strange. Mialise

by Christine L Roland Christine L Roland is a Florida-based writer living with fibromyalgia. She teaches creative writing to high schoolers and is the former Editor in Chief for The Talon Review . Her creative work has appeared in Hellbender , Five on the Fifth , and Ignatian Literary Magazine , centers around themes of identity and agency, and invites readers to explore life’s perplexities via introspection.

by Sage Ravenwood I feared going deaf and then I did. Terrified of losing sight. Deaf already haunts my bones. Fear feeds a quiet madness for simple things. Simple non-threatening, precautionary, better safe than sorry; I’m sorry, I’m deaf – eye exam things. Today. I’m the first deaf client the optometrist has seen. Not helping. What an honor. I was fine , really. How many ways can you say deaf. I can’t hear you if I can’t see you, if I can’t, if I can’t speak because this qu

by Ash Trebisacci Ash Trebisacci (they, them) is a writer and higher education professional whose work has been featured in The Offing , Hunger Mountain , and Cleaver Magazine , among other places. While many doctors have prescribed yoga to cure their chronic pain, they have found a combination of acupuncture and testosterone to be the most helpful. Find more of their work at ashtrebisacci.carrd.co .

Absence, 1999 I almost failed the fifth grade I missed so many days out sick a head full of congestion still not sure why I hadn’t learned yet that old school was full of dust and mold and mildew my yet-to-be determined allergies one day when feeling good enough to go the teacher across the hall wasn’t there the class of children hushed and the next day she wasn’t there again my friend Adam on the playground he told me she killed herself

Silver Lake was it silver or gray, when we staggered west toward the wilderness? A cabin for a weekend, no reception, just you and I and the firs and the ryegrass field blotted with rusted skidders did it rain all night as we laid on our sunken mattress, not speaking? I thought I heard something. Some moonlit animal slithering. Mostly I remember the amphibious clouds the hollowed stumps, a wrung-out loneliness uncoiling It’s a strange thing— all this breaking down only

Body Breaks and Vows Holding you closer while the body breaks Helping you find your feet while I lose my way Handing over a life Hunched and crumbling by disease I have had more years in a disabled body and you are so new to it So confused Holding you closer while the body breaks Helping you find your feet while I lose my way Handing over a life Hunched and crumbling by disease I have had more years in a disabled body and you are so new to it I want to

Hanging Gilded Girls My parents hang portraits of girls who don’t exist. There I am above the bedside stand at five years-old, my dead name embroidered down my dress like a scar. My daughter, my bold one who spends the summer shirtless hangs across from me framed in gold beside the dresser. A hat obscures her face. She’s just a blue gown and hands holding flowers I don’t like that picture my mother sa

The Path of Needles I lay down in bed a little damsel and woke a grandmother. In between: the damp flash of a life I could not wish for or remember. My body soured, a stone fruit sucked clean to the pit. I liked the bright taste of it. I liked the knowing of it, that a pit is not a nothing but a seed. I sewed myself into the sheets and then I rose, the story’s ghost. When the wolf yawned, I plucked his teeth and with them devoured the rest of him, furred and whole. Then

The Body, Electric I will explain. Unlesioned, a spinal nerve produces move- ment, sensation, & (some would say) autonomy. Lesion- ed, on an M R I, it produces light. A miracle—...

Fey I love that word. It might be my favorite monosyllable, how it survives against all connotations of affected, or more to the pointed finger, “disordered in the mind (as one about to die),” “of excitement that presages death,” as if this dig could be applied to such light or lightened spirits. Spirits almost elsewhere, almost away from the trod, the treadmill, the traditional trudge; all the tr- words that trees welcome one back from. Back from trying the world and finding

by Rita Maria Martinez I worried about Jill from QVC who sold holiday finials, certain on air she’d succumb to a spiky peak rending ligament and cartilage from her dainty hand. When Jill retired, I was relieved. Spiky objects scare me. On bad mental health days I sometimes recall a scene from a Charles Bronson movie: a terrified nude woman jumps through a third-story window and is impaled by a spiky fence. On the worst mental health days I am that woman. M

by Leonore Wilson True knowledge comes down to vigils in the darkness: the sum of our insomnias alone distinguishes us from the animals and from our kind. What rich or strange idea was ever the work of a sleeper? E.M.Cioran, A Short History of Decay (1949) I longed for touch health longed for a thimble of breath of fallow deer red-shouldered hawk coyote’s call of poured out prayer I lived root