Recovery: A Poem

J. L. Conrad's Recovery inhabits a dreamscape filled with fragments of conversation, remembered loved ones, and the profound disorientation that accompanies loss. Written over the span of a week, this poetic sequence invites us to imagine how a body flooded with grief or physical pain becomes self-identified with these sensations: a takeover that Elaine Scarry describes as annihilation, blurring "all that is inside and outside" and knotting them together. If grief is an unreality that parallels dreams--this doesn't feel real--then poetry, with its heightened awareness, is what brings us back to the world outside the body. The incantatory poems in this sequence offer a way of moving beyond the self at a time when the only way through is through. Or, in the words that Shoshana Felman offers about Paul Celan's poetry, "To seek reality is both to set out to explore the injury inflicted by it--to turn back on, and try to penetrate, the state of being stricken, wounded by reality [wirklichkeitswund]--and to attempt, at the same time, to reemerge from the paralysis of this state, to engage reality [Wirklichkeitsuchend] as an advent, a movement, and as a vital, critical necessity of moving on." As Conrad's poetry provides glimpses into questions of human frailty, loss, and sentience itself, the speaker in Recovery looks not for transcendence but embraces a body marked and wounded, a body trailing ghosts.
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From "Recovery"
In my dream we were in a tree
and we were suffering. In this case,

suffering with could not alleviate
suffering. It proved impossible to overlook

the pits in our stomachs.

The car lurched forward, into the knees
of the pedestrian, the line of pilgrims.

Author: J. L. Conrad
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Published: 05/18/2023
Pages: 43
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.10lbs
Size: 7.30h x 4.80w x 0.10d
ISBN13: 9781680033403
ISBN10: 1680033409
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | General
- Poetry | Women Authors

About the Author
J. L. CONRAD is the author of the full-length poetry collection A Cartography of Birds and the chapbook Not If But When. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Jellyfish, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and you can find her on the web at www.jlconrad.com.