BLUE ELECTRODE

<p>The poet's work to establish agency in the midst of sickness is so clear and hard fought that one is filled with admiration and wonderment at the ability to carry the reader so deep into her journey with all of its subcurrents.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>-MARY STEWART HAMMOND</strong> author of <em>Out of Canaan</em> (W.W. Norton </p><p>1991) &<em> Entering History</em> (W.W. Norton 2016)</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p>These poems interrogate seizure disorder and recovery its spectrum the people around it family community. In those waters swim a sense of history distortion victimhood the inevitability of scapegoating in fact discrimination and racism. The poems themselves seize. Their strongest light is their willingness to inhabit the very kindling of the neurons the highway clothed in goldenrod. Indeed as the poet writes in Blue Electrode the title poem Yes my mother thinks to herself/ tying her torn scarf/ the words Epilepsy and Woe/ are synonymous.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>-RALPH BURNS</strong><strong> </strong>author of <em>but not yet</em> (Lynx House Press 2017) Winner of </p><p>The Blue Lynx Poetry Prize & <em>Ghost Notes</em> (Oberlin College Press 2000) </p><p>Winner of The<em> Field</em> Poetry Prize</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>