Swollening

(Paperback)

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A tender debut poetry collection that examines the queer, sick body as a reaction to an ill world and asks it how to move on toward hope.

Jason Purcells debut collection of poems rests at the intersection of queerness and illness, staking a place for the queer body that has been made sick through living in this world. Part poetic experiment and part memoir, Swollening attempts to diagnose what has been undiagnosable, tracing an uneven path from a lifetime of swallowing bad feelingshomophobia in its external and internalized manifestations, heteronormativity, anxiety surrounding desire, aversion to sexto a body in revolt.

In poems that speak using the grammar and logics of sickness, Purcell offers a dizzying collision of word and image that is the language of pain alongside the banality of living on. Beginning by reading his own life and body closely and slowly zooming out to read illness in the world, Purcell comes to ask: how might a sick, queer body forgive itself for a natural reaction to living in a sick world and go on toward hope In Swollening, Purcell coughs up his own poetics of illness, his own aesthetics of pain, to form a tender collection that lands straight in the gut.

Reviews

"In Swollening, Purcell tears open and probes beneath the physical with precision, only to stitch it back up for intimacy--viscerally encapsulating the push and pull, shrink and swell of being embodied. A welcome debut by a sophisticated and promising writer." --Vivek Shraya, author of even this page is white and I'm Afraid of Men

Author Bio

Jason Purcell is a writer and musician from amiskwacwskahikan, Treaty 6, (Edmonton, Alberta), where they are also the co-owner of Glass Bookshop. As a chronically ill writer, they write at the intersection of queerness and illness and is the author of the chapbook A Place More Hospitable (Anstruther Press). Swollening is their first full-length collection.