Junie Désil, allostatic load

cancel Calm, and apps like Focus, Zen, and Freedom
the ones that liberate time.
close all the two hundred and fifty-two open
tabs on my phone about self-care, mindbodygreen,
sourdough recipes, listicles, BuzzFeed, Bored Panda,
20 FACTS ABOUT MARLON BRANDO
and other articles like “How I Stopped Working
for the Man and Brought In
over Six Figures a Month,” says the rosy-cheeked
french-manicured blond influencer. 

cancel all my health-type subscriptions,
turn off all my notifications and reminders
to drink water, to get up and stretch for thirty seconds,
to box breathe, cancel previously free now not-free pandemic
subscriptions during my short-lived shelter-in-place
aspirations of knitting, breadmaking, preserve making,
guitar playing, indie-film watching. 

put on my noise-cancelling earphones
and actually – i want to so much –
rest.

The second full-length collection by British Columbia poet Junie Désil, following eat salt │ gaze at the ocean (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2020) [see my review of such here], is allostatic load (Talonbooks, 2025), a collection titled after a term coined by Bruce McEwen and Eliot Stellar in 1993, referring specifically to the wear and tear on the body that accumulates as an individual is exposed to repeated or chronic stress. As the cover copy informs, the poems in this collection navigate “the racialized interplay of chronic wear and tear during tumultuous years marked by global racial tensions, the commodification of care, and the burden of systematic injustice,” specifically one that seeks to “hold the vulnerability and resilience required to navigate deep healing in a world that does not wish you well […].” Across detailed, intimate and meditative lyric stretches, Désil offers first-person explorations and exhaustions across the difficulties of navigating not only her own particular wear, but a medical system determined to undermine her experiences. As she writes as part of the poem “in the doctor’s office,” near the opening of the collection: “when i look at you / and people of your ethnicity // i would say you should / start on Metformin. // scrawls on her notepad she /tells me have a think.” Throughout, Désil attends the long line, the ongoing thought, one that extends within and between each poem, less a narrative than a sweep, a suite, a flow.

at work when i log in
my emails number in the three digits.
still. emerge from my four-day
migraine 

and previous to that my two-week
vacation working-at-home-catching-up
staycation, and previous to that a number 

of breaks that have done nothing
to bring my stress or workload down. i start
the twentieth to-do list 

that never gets shorter
and my heart begins its erratic
thumping.

There are echoes here of other medical-themed titles, titles that examine physical and emotional vulnerabilities in fearless and revealing ways, whether Ottawa writer Christine McNair’s hybrid/memoir Toxemia (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2024) [see my essay on such here], New York City poet Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.’s After the Operation (New York NY: Four Way Books, 2025), Regina, Saskatchewan poet Tea Gerbeza’s How I Bend Into More (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024) [see my review of such here] or Toronto poet Therese Estacion’s Phantompains (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Désil’s allostatic load, alternately, also offers an additional series of layerings, as the poem “on a particularly bad year-long stretch” affirms, writing: “of racial injustice, extrajudicial killings // work microaggressions / general climate of anti-Blackness // my body expropriated – pain / wouldn’t let me out of bed // my body—was this betrayal? or / affirmation[.]”

Set with single-poem “prologue I” (“searching for indicators”) and three numbered section-clusters of poems—“allostatic load,” “weathering” and “medicine”—the first two sections holding a single-poem “prologue II” (“Coping Like John Henry”) between them, offering a suite of poems in slow build, a spread-out and accumulative description of stress, excess, medical complications and stressful interactions before the eventual emergence into something that might provide salve. This collection asks: What does care look like through such perpetual onslaught on the senses? How might care even be possible? “when the medical-office assistant ushers me down the hall,” begins “on my Nth visit to yet another medical professional,” “and asks me to get on the scale / it fails to tell her that the number reflects / the cares i neglect to dispense, / emails i forgot to dispatch – including the ones sitting / rent-free in my brain, the owed return phone calls, / and text messages, and emails, and to-dos, / and 252 open tabs, and / unfinished conversations settling in my chest, / on my hips, in my thighs. i eat my feelings / because it’s unacceptable to have them, no that’s not / true. i portion control my emotions and keep / my mouth busy so as not to earn the angry Black woman / badge.”

As well, I appreciate this mention of, this linkage to, Cecily Nicholson’s poetry title prior to this current one [see my review of such here], allowing a conversation between these two titles, connecting the narrator and experience of one to the other, both poetry collections writing of and around colonialism and race, and of finally attempting a sequence of grounding, sustainability and responsibility, through working their hands through the soil. As Désil writes as part of the third and final section, “medicine”:

i read HARROWINGS while overturning soil on abandoned beds,
violently hacking the blackberries back, burning piles of thorny,
snake-thick vines. the blackberry bushes have invaded and
colonized the beds and the surrounding soil, choking the male
kiwi tree – also overbrown, its branches braiding beautifully
as it drapes. slash through the uneasiness – on this soil that i
tell people is home – here. the three goats i’ve inherited browse
nearby on the blackberry bushes that we haven’t gotten to. later
they will sit contentedly, stare, regurgitate their earlier meal.