Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at Paradise

To read Jennifer Metsker’s Hypergraphia is to enter into an associative circus of sonic playfulness unencumbered by the need for sense-making. Bunnies and moons and the “burning igloo” of night sweats chart their way through poems as the speaker lurks “on the edges,” watching the sky descend. Metsker’s struggles with mental illness are depicted as painterly insights:

[…] I have a little cart for hauling wood. I have a chopping block. And the God swallow, the hard lump? The past is a  looking glass lodged there, a gilt frame resting on the larynx. Past participles. Pangaea. Prairie grass. And all those scary bits, the  voices before dawn, the loss of dawn. I can’t admit that all these things have an underlying hum. 

As the un-utter-able object moves from an abstract lump in the throat of a deity to the speaker’s own “underlying hum,” we learn about how Metsker imagines the tension between the imminent and the transcendent, between the material and the ideal. The speaker is the moon is the bunny is the God who cannot swallow, and what she “knows” and who she “is” are contested epistemological and ontological categories. In a meeting with a psychiatrist, the speaker answers riddles with her own logic. The pay phone is always prank-calling and “words were candy-boxes.” Yet, these poems are not non-sensical: “On the day of my release, my father gave chocolate-covered strawberries to the cheerless staff who had strapped me to the bed.” 

This book had me thinking about how literature engages with discourses of mental illness and disability studies and about the role of the critic in talking about such poems in ways that don’t rely on abled realities. What we need, as this book makes clear, is a critical and evaluative language that can speak to—without pathologizing as narrowly fantastical—differently abled worldviews.