Visceral Poetics

Literary Nonfiction. Literary Criticism. Poetry. Memoir. Hybrid Genre. Medicine and Health. Translation Studies. Performance Studies. Foreword by Alphonso Lingis. VISCERAL POETICS tracks "the chronic syndrome of the West" and the cruel treatments of poetry's resistance. At once a call for an embodied scholarship, a poetic work of criticism, and a fragmentary autoethnography of the author's health crisis at the millennium, Eleni Stecopoulos's book moves in a complex field of languages and bodies, between symptom and art, diagnosis and composition, fascia and form. Stecopoulos aligns her method with diviners of entrails and holistic healers, tracing the resonance between locations that range from demonic possession and parasitic vowels to acupuncture and diaspora Greek. This poet-scholar seeks "to overwrite discourses of pathology with currents of empathy."

"Eleni Stecopoulos is singularly aware of a healing power in poetry that touches the most obscure depths of our carnal existence."—Alphonso Lingis

"Eleni Stecopoulos's brilliantly provocative, syncretic manifesto identifies idiopathic disease with ideolectical poetics, pathology with anomaly—the flesh of the text and the text of the flesh—bringing home the liberatory potential for visceral readings of the unintelligible. For Stecopoulos, diagnosis is a practice of aesthetic translation and poetry a quest for knowledge outside the disabling strictures of Western rationalism. Written in lyric bursts of telegraphic intensity, Stecopoulos follows her guides, Artaud and Metcalf, through veils of suffering in order to repossess, from the jaws of evisceration, her own life—and ours."—Charles Bernstein

"In a thick rich book of Artaudian trickster moves, Eleni Stecopoulos performs healing rituals upon medical practices and cultural prescriptions, writing toward her own healing process, with opacity as sustaining wayfarer and shield against early collapse. Disease emerges as narrative symptom for disconnect, and language becomes subtle homeopathy, weaves a new myth, for suffering writers and suffering war-torn worlds, in a visceral poetics based on Artaud's asylum writings: 'a rhythm of exorcism against the drying out of opium by conspiracies and consecrations' (Artaud, Selected Writings)."—Petra Kuppers