Editor's note: The 16th annual High Plains Book Awards recognizes regional literary works which examine and reflect life on the High Plains, including the states of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado and Kansas, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. highplainsbookawards.org
The First Book Award honors a writer’s first published book in any category.
“Miraculous Sickness” by Ky Perraun is a finalist in the First Book category of the 2022 High Plains Book Awards. In the epigraph, Perraun quotes Dr. Mark Vonnegut, who assumed his bipolar disorder to have poetic (rather than biochemical) causes and that he would never be able to find a poet “skilled enough” to express what was happening to him.
Perraun, herself a schizophrenic, hopes that in this collection, she is “poet / enough to give voice to those whose silence / screams to be acknowledged.” Thus, her purpose.
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Perraun’s poems trace the history of the disease back to the Egyptians, how King David “required music to exile the demon/ inhabiting his soul” through Galen, Nebuchadnezzar, Christ, Avicenna, Hippocrates, Freud, and the inhuman treatments foisted on the mentally ill throughout the ages. The speaker of these poems measures herself in the context of the inhuman treatments of history and finds that “nobody knows for certain” the cause of the disease, but. “Only the suffering is indisputable.”
In the third section, Perraun shows how those with schizophrenia can progress. The meds provide calm and normality on one hand, but they also desensitize and desexualize.
Cursed and blessed, I accept
the risk of living
with a disease of the mind. I clutch the hand
that is offered me, though no cure comes.
Finally, the poet realizes that she can help herself and give voice to others too. Her tool is. . .
The pen, the instrument with which you navigate
the chaos, you journal and compose with[, p]rogress evident
in the paragraph, the line.
So as she sharpens the writing, in a “cool cast of reflection,” she retains the “flames of inspiration” of the painful experiences. The poems and journal entries give her distance and objectivity while giving birth to a renewed, transformed experience, and as a result, “[r]ecovery begins.”
By objectifying her experiences as a person with schizophrenia, the poet transcends the experiences of those whose “screaming” silence she seeks to acknowledge, and in doing so, she legitimizes their experiences and shows that she has made of her illness something miraculous.
JP Mandler is a retired teacher who lives in Connecticut.
You are Invited – October 8!
Book Sale and Author Panels – 11 AM – 5 PM – Billings Public Library
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