Medical gaslighting of women explored

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This article was published 25/01/2025 (350 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In Toxemia (Book*hug, 176 pages, $23), Christine McNair uses medical and cultural histories, folklore and memoir to consider, specifically, preeclampsia — and more generally, the way pregnancy, chronic and acute illnesses are treated in women. McNair’s use of a prose line throughout the text seamlessly blends moves from critique and analysis to memoir to the immediacy of lived memory.

“I am now more afraid of telling doctors my history,” she writes, after struggling to get adequate care for depression while she is breastfeeding. In the penultimate poem, McNair opens with the disorienting truth: “I’ve been told my memories are not my own.”

While the subject of this specific poem is family memories, which are in fact repeated family stories and the way they’re transmitted, the thought itself and the way it’s expressed ties in with the sense of medical gaslighting and its effects, which reverberate throughout the book.

In Imparfait, the line contributes to establishing a mood of suffocating anxiety, along with McNair’s use of structural and semantic repetitions: “My brain is lit up and hard electric, the same as before. The pain in the side. The brain lit up and electric and a pressing sense of doom and heartache in the bones go on and on and won’t stop.” In addition to the repetitions, McNair breaks the rhythm in the final sentence, lengthening the thought into an extended cycle of breathlessness.

The second half of Imparfait takes place two years later and echoes the first half with similar images, sentence structures and repetitions. However, the end of the poem diverges sharply from that of the first half: “and I don’t want to die between my children and there’s nothing but waiting in the dark and it takes too long and I’m waiting. I turn on my side and turn on a meditation app. Pour lavender oil on my throat.”

While the first half of the poem ends on “waiting,” this ending establishes a connection between the panic brought on by physical symptoms and the physical symptoms of panic.

None of this implies McNair is imagining her suffering nor an unreliable witness thereto. The panic attack she depicts in the second half of the poem, though it structurally rhymes with her near death in the first, doesn’t alter the first experience.

Rather, what she’s doing here and in the rest of Toxemia is, in a deep way, accepting the confusions and contradictions, as well as claiming herself: “When pen lifts where feet drop dust to ash and peach to peach. Perverse results aside: I am not sorry. Butterflies batter down the hatches and keep time. I bite my fingers for the salt I walk my road I — My intent was never.”

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Dennis Cooley’s latest long poem, Love in a Dry Land (Turnstone, 143 pages, $20), is an astonishing response to Sinclair Ross’s classic Canadian novel As For Me And My House. Cooley transforms the agonizing silences between Phylis and Philip, the self-conscious correctness of the original novel into a polyvocal tour de force of emotional openness and rhetorical exuberance.

The sections narrated by Phylis and Philip are extraordinary in themselves, true in a fundamental way to the original text but also exceeding its bounds.

However, the section narrated by Paul showcases Cooley’s technical and imaginative virtuosity. In Paul’s sign, Cooley transforms Paul’s use of etymology and an excess of linguistic precision to hide something essential in himself into textual and visual play: “in deucing inte/rest before all/ others Grade One Pro/ duce A-1 Hard A-1 all the way.” The letters in greyscale are partly obscured by “entry/entry,” which is rendered in the original text in large font.

Cooley’s use of visual poetry and concrete sound techniques begins to explore what it means to both be, and to make of someone, a cipher.

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Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.