Jessica Popeski, The Problem with Having a Body

 

iv

markham’s interlocking leaves
that tweenage hand trick
here’s the church here’s the steeple
a sugar, norway, silver, emerald queen maple
and tulip, redmond linden, hackberry, horse chestnut
schubert chokecherry marquee

a willow drizzles to tarmac at harbord
the pong of a skunk feast
a block below bloor
candy cane spatter
meat fly-amassed

not supposed to bike but i bike
the way my body overburns

around ramhorn handles
nails tipped maroon shellac
all the rings are falling from my fingers (“come clean”)

Following the chapbooks The Wrong Place (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2015 ) and Oratorio (Anstruther Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] comes Toronto-based “dis/abled opera singer, Professor of English, Creative Writing, and Music, and internationally published, intersectional ecofeminist poet” Jessica Popeski’s full-length poetry debut, The Problem with Having a Body (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2025). As the back cover offers, this is a collection of poems “that unites Jessica Popeski’s preoccupations with intersectional ecofeminism, epigenetics, and the inheritance of fractured, grandmaternal generational lines. It reconciles private and public conflicts, examining how political and geographical rupture and war zones generate traumatic, ancestral memory by chronicling experiences of moving through the world with dis/ability and anorexia. Accompanied by the insistence of matrilineal song, these poems ask loud questions about cyclical bouts of anxiety and depression, madness, illness, voicelessness, and disordered eating.”

The poems in The Problem with Having a Body hold a precise measure of descriptive nuance; offering precise rhythm, hush, halt and flow. “when it rains it drizzles ceaselessly,” the short sequence “flatline” begins, “so everything gets soaked / in my dreams i sleep / until six // ribs are scaffolding / stretch skin like cellophane / over leftovers [.]” Popeski writes through narratives of illness and the body, and matrilineal lines; of long-term dis/ability, wrapping her subject matter tight around the provocations of the book’s title, and the title poem, that offers: “the problem with having a / body is you have to carry // it everywhere with you. / mine has held the curlicue / of three babies & still // i’ve no one to show for it; / a hoard of manila medical // files cramped & yellowing.”

The collection is structured in two sections, the bulk of which exists as “the pros and cons of staying sick,” followed by a far shorter section of more visually-focused poems, “sculptured,” akin to a kind of coda or punctuation. “this is how you / lose me.” she writes, to close the poem “this is how you lose me,” set in the opening section of the collection, “i won’t // eat for days, & / dream of folding // myself through / the tissuey air // of the humber / bay arch bridge.” That is such a lovely passage, that—“dream of folding // myself through / the tissuey air”—one of many that stopped me in my tracks, wanting to read it once more, a bit slower. Hold on to that phrase, that image.

There is something curious about the way Popeski’s poems, specifically the more narrative first-person lyrics of the opening section, seem to focus on the moments between occurrences, writing a kind of deceptive calm before the next thing, the next event, or following what has already occurred. Her descriptive passages write of movement, mid-gesture, offering layers of descriptive straightforwardnesses that accumulate upon each other, but somehow end up somewhere other than the presumed sum of the poem’s parts. These are the poems that allow the narrator the ability to hold it together through levels of uncertainty and illness. These are poem-markers, across a far broader narrative, not all of which needs to be seen to be understood. “the room in its semicircle,” the sequence “come clean” ends, “sits up / a ruler-straight row / the youngest faces rose-redden / know this is what they have [.]”

As well, the poems in the book’s end-section shift from the narrative structures of the pieces in the opening, instead offering grid-structures, building blocks, of words and phrases; poem-structures with titles “university health network,” “healthy,” “underweight,” “overweight,” “obese,” “extremely obese,” “muscle tension dysphonia / false cards,” “krrrrrr,” “my oh my,” “nyay,” “kay” and “no.” There’s something of the Greek chorus to these poems, punctuating a number of the underlying subjects throughout the first section, providing something playful and serious to close out. Utlizing the building blocks of shape, hashtag and repetition, the poem “obese,” reads, in full:

#pigout #sweettooth #foodcoma #cake
#pigout #sweettooth #foodcoma #cake #cook
             #sweettooth #foodcoma #cake #cook
             #sweettooth #foodcoma #cake #cook #fattofit
                        #sweettooth #foodcoma #cake #cook #fattofit
                        #sweettooth #foodcoma #cake #cook #fattofit