Admissions: Voices within mental health
Upswell, $29.99 hb, 346 pp
'Decomposed and desired'
'There are 206 bones in our bodies / and mine / are just like yours,’ writes Luka Lesson, rejecting the idea of the fundamental difference between the neurotypical and those who fill the pages of Admissions: Voices within mental health. ‘But I’ll be white ochre if I want to,’ the poet clarifies. ‘I’ll be eaten and reclaimed / decomposed and desired / if I want to.’ These words are about difference and dying, but the speaker is not ready ‘to feed the dirt’, and the poem is a resolute stocktake – of bones, of veins which have been named, and of the breaths transliterated here, breaths ‘that I may have never taken / and they / are the best shit / that I ever wrote.’
Sam Twyford-Moore’s contribution dwells on mania’s ‘radioactive half-life’: the wrecked friendships, reputational losses, and ‘financial implications of past transgressions’. The uneven, delicate taxonomy of mental health is tied, he suggests, to the deeper, shifting terrain of lived experience. He writes of a desire ‘to create work which reads as chaotically and incoherently as the condition itself … In which case, questions of the qualitative type should be rendered useless. Your criticism doesn’t really matter.’
Concisely invoking hospital and courtroom, Admissions is a collection of careful admissions about neurodivergent and medicalised life. While there are many contributions from leading poets and public figures in the 105 poems, lyrics, essays, and illustrations, others were gathered through an open Red Room Poetry call. The effect is a polyvocal show of force and difference. These are all ways of living and being, difficult and glorious voices which have long been thrust to the margins to be interpreted heavy-handedly, or never heard at all.
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