Side Effects May Include Strangers (Volume 55)

By Dominik Parisien

2020

First Published

4.47

Average Rating

Number of Pages

2H45M

Audio Length

Ask, Can we for a moment make of beauty / the measure of our pain? and I will answer. To be ill is to be a body bursting with strangers. A curiosity. A narrative to interpret. Dominik Parisien's debut collection is a poignant celebration of the complicated lived experience of disability, a challenge to the societal gaze, and a bold reconfiguration of the language of pain. A powerful contribution to the field of disability poetics, Side Effects May Include Strangers is an affecting look at the multitude of ways a body is both boundary and boundless. Parisien takes bpNichol's claim that "what is a poem is inside of your body" and localizes the inner and outer lives of disabled, queer, and aging bodies as points of meaning for issues of autonomy, disability, sexuality, and language. Balancing hope and uncertainty, anger and gratitude, these poems shift from medical practice to myth, from trauma to intergenerational friendship, in an unflinching exploration of the beauty and complexity of othered bodies.

Avg Rating

4.47

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

62%

4 STARS

29%

3 STARS

2 STARS

1 STARS

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Author

Dominik Parisien

Author · 2 books

Dominik Parisien is an editor, poet, and writer. He is the author of the forthcoming memoir On a Scale of 1 to 500 Miles and the poetry collection Side Effects May Include Strangers (2020). He is also the co-editor, along with Navah Wolfe, of The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, Robots vs Fairies, and The Mythic Dream. With Elsa Sjnunneson-Henry, he is the co-editor of Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. His anthologies have won several awards, including the Hugo, Shirley Jackson, British Fantasy, and Aurora Awards. His work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Humber Literary Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Quill & Quire, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons,, and various other journals. Dominik is a disabled, bisexual, French Canadian. He lives in Hamilton.