Hemicrania, Hemicrania

In Hemicrania, poet Therese Gleason reaches out through the “half-headed pain” of the migraineur, despite (or rather, because of) “her head a cracked bell/ that wouldn’t stop ringing.” Like the two halves of the brain, this chapbook succeeds by dualities. Both thematically cohesive and formally expansive, Hemicrania tells the story, on one side, of the mostly male failures of medicine, and on the other, of the matrilineal inheritance of suffering “which women must endure.” Borrowing language from medicine but wholly rooted in poetry, the Patient is both reduced to the base elements of piss, salt, bile, and snot and elevated to the mystic, ghostly realm of saints, incantation, and prayer. Gleason asks “what angel, message, lesson” can be found in suffering. But even if, in the end, the Patient resigns, “I’m no more chosen than I am god/forsaken,” the poet has made from her suffering this simultaneously delicate and explosive contribution to the literature of women’s chronic pain.—Cynthia Marie Hoffman, author of Exploding HeadChronic and episodic migraine patients will agree that they’ll do anything and everything to exorcise the migraine demon. Author Therese Gleason attempts just that in Hemicrania via revelatory poems brimming with prayers, incantations, and supplications. The poet gives readers the 4-1-1 from the front lines of Migrainesville in poems that confront medical sexism and medical gaslighting—and in poems that explore the conundrum of genetic inheritance. The vulnerability and daily struggle of the person with migraine are depicted with vivid accuracy and candor. Hemicrania should reside on the nightstands of poetry lovers, patients, physicians, and caregivers.—Rita Maria Martinez, author of The Jane and Bertha in MeTo read Hemicrania is to witness a poet contend with profound spiritual and physical agony. In found poems, hybrid forms, and collages, Gleason traces her family’s matrilineal inheritance of migraine alongside an enraging genealogy of the medical establishment’s all-too-frequent disregard for migraineurs’ suffering. And while Hemicrania is a scorching account of migraine’s brutal toll on body and mind, in its pages Gleason offers too a psalter of companionship: invocations, incantations, and charms against pain drawn from a thousand years of belief and experience. The unflinching intimacy of these poems humbled me.—Carolyn Oliver, author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the TrembleIn Hemicrania, a gut-wrenching and aesthetically innovative portrait of the matrilineal curse of migraine, Therese Gleason renders the ineffable. Equal parts masterclass in vivifying the medical archive and gripping reportage from the patient’s vantage, Gleason’s intimate poems shatter migraineurs’ isolation to deliver spells for a painless future.—Sarah M. Sala, author of Devil’s Lake