Anything Ingestible

Abstract

Anything Ingestible focuses on the way inherited narratives of female illness – both cultural and personal – shape a female addict’s experience of their addiction and their body, and the way the two obsessions are related. The collection explores one of the fundamental dualities of addiction: the extreme isolation and deprivation of sickness and the sense of community that addiction treatment can provide. The long poem at the center of the collection – “A New Engine for Softening Bones” – uses a 1681 invention by Denis Papin as a means to explore the machinery of the body and the cyclicality of chronic illness and addiction, as well as the way that addiction blurs physical and psychological pain.