As Ennis mentions in the author’s note, medical trauma is real, and some bodies are treated differently. You are supposed to recover or die, to be an angel or a source of hope, possibly because regardkess those who treat us should honestly be locked up (my mother calls me into the living room every time there’s a disabled performer on reality television)
If you’re on Twitter, you’ve seen all the posts from young men and women becoming doctors or doing house jobs, and sometimes the callousness astounds us. It makes you sit there and know that you should focus on your health because being at their mercy would be something else.
And when it comes to mental health, that’s its own unregulated ball game.
But what do you do when your illness or disability means that you’ll constantly be at the receiving end of the worst? That is what Ennis writes about in this book. But it’s also a conversation about the body and what you feel when it feels like when the thing we’re meant to exist in, doesn’t seem to want to exist for us. What sheer will can stand for and what love can and cannot make us feel.
I’m not a good poetry reviewer, even though I read a lot of it; but Beautiful Malady is one of the best anthologies I’ve read this year and deserves to be checked out! You can tell that this is not the authors first rodeo; Ennis has published other works of fiction and poetry, and this reflects that experience. It’s a well put together collection that has a theme that it sticks to instead of being all over the place.