Alarming, complex, and liberated from the tropes of patienthood, Brett Stuckel's Neurocabin recalls his lived experience of brain cancer and corresponding treatment, including an awake craniotomy, a process demanding radical reorientation in and to the world. The body is both subject and object: "They put my head under the molded mask," he writes, "bolt in four / bolts, two on each side, and snug webbing onto my face to keep my jaw tight." From these reflections emerge new triangulations among mind, body, and self; then, now, and then again. "I imagine imagining the future will / help us remember," he writes. Then, later, "I am dad / to my dad. / I am grandfather / to myself." Yes, Neurocabin is a book about mortality-the body's trials amid dire prognoses and medical labyrinths-but it is also about the body moving through time. In these poems, time fluctuates, runs out, drags on, heals all, annihilates, reels forward and back. I do not look to these poems for a sense of hope or acceptance but for the strange constancy of a poet whose language has been shaped by his life.
-JANE HUFFMAN, author of Public Abstract
Reading Brett Stuckel's debut poetry collection, Neurocabin, is to be taken on a deep dive through an imaginative while intimately embodied blood-brain barrier, striking notes into neurotransmitters. Many of the poems engage graphic themes underscoring the vicissitudes of enduring brain cancer. More than a collection of resilience and survival stories, however, Neurocabin communicates and communes via a keen disability cultural aesthetic that finds simultaneous resonances in the prosaic, the pragmatic, and the abstracted. Themes, subjects, and imagery careen between and across scales and scopes, from astronomy, felines, spices, local terrain, and limnology, to hospital bed railings, the magnets of the MRI machine, kitchen appliances, and suture minutiae. And as it may be, as Stuckel tells us in "Grounded," that "there is no such / thing as shore," there is so very much to immerse us in these poems.
-DIANE R. WIENER, Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature
Brett Stuckel has mapped the territory of brain tumor in ways horrifyingly and thrillingly exact to the awful, specific beauty of anaplastic astrocytoma-the star that is not a light year away, but right at hand. He has also left open on that map wide swathes of territory for those living with other cancers and, indeed, anyone living with chronic, uncertain disease. His language is utterly original and utterly close to hand. As much pain as there is in these pages, there are also lines of transcendent beauty. Thinking of the moment of death: "after your lungs are empty, / before the fingertips / close your eyes." This harsh and lovely book will bring courage and comfort to those living with illness, and to those who care for them.
-DEBORAH BURNHAM, author of Tart Honey
