Jason Purcell, Crohnic

 

On the banks of the North Saskatchewan I shed
my velvet having to rest again on the white powder 

line snow like a tablet crushed and blown toward the crisp
blank future a shrinking 

place where health and death are the same
temperature where I am calculated and reduced so 

there is less of me to keep alive on the banks
of the North Saskatchewan I sat down and sacrificed

And so reads the opening page, the opening passage, of the second full-length collection by Edmonton poet Jason Purcell, the long poem Crohnic (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025), a collection that follows their full-length debut, Swollening (Arsenal Pulp, 2022) [see my review of such here]. Documenting the landscape of the experience of navigating endless (timeless) time spent in hospital across a diagnosis and treatment of Crohn’s disease, Purcell’s book-length lyric suite, their long poem, articulates an experience from deep within it through a stitch of lyric bursts, of fragments. “Lindsay gives me the idea for this book.” the second page, the second passage, begins, as Purcell speaks of the original prompt by one of their nurses. As Purcell writes, Crohnic writes of and around the experience of “a severe and long-undiagnosed case of Crohn’s disease, [as] each day I swallow down pills and every month I receive infusions by IV that whittle me down but keep me going in the meantime. Like Lindsay says, intense and persistent medical intervention can feel hard to handle.” Purcell writes passages, lyric bursts and broken lines, composed from within a kind of ongoingness, offering medical updates and snapshots of the river valley just outside the window. As they write, early on: “on the banks of the North Saskatchewan I am too // human and I impose that on everything that isn’t too / clear-cut what ill-suited gaze did I carry down and fix // on this landscape its residents the narcissism of being / damaged and thinking the rest is too // a prescribing cold reaches toward and embraces / me the silver skin lifts and peels from the birch // at my side mosses turn their slow growth north / an animal leaves its fur in the branches.”

The winding architecture of the hand
and wrist hanging from the dorsal venous
arch it crumbles
distributes strain I remember
walking beneath it and hearing
a brook’s jewelled noise against stone
somewhere underground deep
in my body where there is some
reservoir I must draw from so long
as I live in this temporary structure

The collage-journal of the book’s overall structure provides a curious book-length tapestry, reminiscent, somehow (of all things), Vancouver writer George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower Press, 1970), as both write through a sequence, a discovery poem, of loosely-connected self-contained narrative bursts across a larger, however loose, project-length narrative. Across their text, Purcell repeats the idea and image of “architecture,” reinforcing the central elements of their narrative structure: a sketchbook of notes while feeling trapped within both their own body and the hospital building. “it is better to stay quiet and allow / all of this to happen I shrink the architecture // of this place loses shape / through each swinging doorway are spaces that grow,” they write, some twenty pages in. These are poems held in temporal space, composed from within a perpetual, endless immediate, where the only passage of time comes through nursing shifts, the weather outside, or the shifts of the seasons.

Looking out to a place I can’t reach
on foot until the snow comes 

under me are the tall generations
of conifers whose generations don’t go 

so far back only as far
as the trampling things grow 

undisturbed far away neglect
blossoms unexpected 

richness the northern bog
violet reseeds its mauves 

across the bare gut plain
over the horizon 

that colours the receding evening’s gaze
neither malign nor benign.

Crohnic follows a loose trajectory of multiple poetry collections addressing issues of illness, whether short-term or long term, moving into elements of disability poetics articulated by prior titles including their own full-length debut, as well as Calgary poet nikki reimer’s [sic] (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2010) [see my review of such here], the late Los Angeles County writer Hillary Gravendyk’s (1979-2014) Harm (Richmond CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2012) [see my review of such here], Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley’s departures (Winnipeg MN: Turnstone Press, 2016) [see my review of such here], Montreal poet Lauren Turner’s The Only Card in a Deck of Knives (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2020) [see my review of such here], Toronto poet Therese Estacion’s Phantompains (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2021) [see my review of such here], the reissue of Philadelphia poet and publisher Brian Teare’s fifth trade poetry collection, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015; New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], Kingston, Ontario poet Ashley-Elizabeth Best’s Bad Weather Mammals (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], Calgary poet Amy LeBlanc’s I used to live here (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025) [see my review of such here], Toronto poet Jessica Popeski’s The Problem with Having a Body (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2025) [see my review of such here] and even Ottawa poet Christine McNair’s hybrid/memoir, Toxemia (Book*hug, 2024) [see my essay on such here]. The structure of writing extended passages from one’s hospital bed, as well, is reminiscent of Dennis Cooley’s work during a hospital stay after a burst appendix (the central core of the collection departures), elements of which he first articulated across the “new” of his sunfall: new and selected poems 1980-1996 (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1996). Or, as Purcell writes:

But all the while, outside my window, winter goes on, teaching me how to rest. From my apartment perched in the trees of amiskwaciwâskahikan where I convalesce, where I look out onto the North Saskatchewan and her river valley, I learn how to wait. The trees lining the water lose their bulk and stand thin at the banks. The river freezes over with psoriatic plaque. Animals borrow, storing and hunting, knowing not to expend. Outside the city bogs and muskeg bubble, cradling that which slowly decomposes. Winter breathes slowly in sacred dormancy.

I am trying to learn an obvious lesson: everything is entangled in a relationship with life and death. Decay feeds life, and the non-human world does not seem to enforce strict division between these orders; life and death are both a kind of flourishing, co-creating possibilities. Winter puts us to sleep so we can be reborn. I take my prescribed and measured harms so that I can live more fully. The river flows, sheets over, changes state, and then