Crohnic

A poetic meditation on what it means to live a medicated life, looking toward sites of nature, where life and death exist side by side

Crohnic is a brilliant and moving collection of poems that asks, what is the landscape of a medicated life? From their convalescence in a room that overlooks the North Saskatchewan River, author Jason Purcell thinks ecologically with medical records, prescriptions, and dosages, staying attuned to place and to what it might mean to live a life relying on something in this case, an interminable course of medication that hurts you in some ways to help you in others. How does the terrain of life change?

Crohnic charts two years of Purcell's treatment for Crohn's disease, journeying from hospital rooms to bogs and muskeg, places where life and death intermingle and create the conditions for one another's flourishing. This is a world populated by coyotes, ermines, steroids, pine, infusion drips, moss, pills, and ice. These other-than-human beings come together in Crohnic, coalescing into relations that together form a personal narrative of the management of chronic illness.

'In Crohnic, Purcell documents the violences of medicalization but also locates within its cruelties a poetics of crip survival that never defaults to a toxically positive, hyperindependent "resilience". Convalescence, Purcell reveals, is a painful gift of crip time lived from the hospital bed and one that reorients our values around what it really means to "live in this temporary structure" called a bodymind, a life.' Travis Chi Wing Lau, author of Vagaries and What's Left Is Tender

'Jason Purcell has woven together an engrossing narrative and mastery of language that had me wanting more, reaching for a "spoiled horizon". I will return to this book over and over again to admire its form and flow. This is a timeless work that will remain important to queer prairie literature for generations.' Emily Riddle, author of The Big Melt

'Jason Purcell's Crohnic is a marvel. The poems in this book are as exquisite as the sick body in all its "own ways of knowing". Even in their most medicalized state, Purcell resists medicalization's definition of self; instead, they write their body into a new ecosystem with wondrous, striking clarity. Crohnic is a love poem to a self that forges its own rebirth.' Tea Gerbeza, author of How I Bend Into More