1. In her collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void, Jackie Wang recasts the contents of her dreams as poetry. I have always had nightmares. What I remember of my dreams, if I remember them at all, is full of holes. The dedication is the door we walk through to enter the collection. For this hospital diary, this barbed record, the door is made of memory and dreams: Pitiful’s primary materials.
2. I note the staccato syntax of Bird’s lyric, ravenous and rapt as I am reading. Contexts without objects. Objects without actions. On purpose, this collection confuses beginnings and endings, insides and outsides. “Contagious as a day.” Bird is writing about themselves, and also illness, poverty, colonization, religion. An exchange between desire and fullness. They ask: what recourse exists for a body that’s been rejected? Each page’s empty space resurrects a hole, a post-memory, a right-now, a what-if.
3. “I want to live / longer than my ancestors but I don’t want / to suffer, no, I want to feel nothing / at all.” Here, Bird detonates the victim narrative. Instead of telling a story whose outcomes are pity and “resilience,” they reject the colonizer’s terms outright. Staying alive is not an intangible dream, nor “pretty & harmless.” Neither is helping others stay alive who don’t always want to. So what if one’s sadness is sometimes self-punishment? This book makes me rethink everything I have ever known about illness. In 2020, I returned often to Johanna Hedva’s question, which I have even more often misremembered: Are these my body’s limits, or the limits of the world? In the original writing, Hedva does not reference their body at all.
4. At the centre is Bird’s long poem “Post-Memory.” The psych ward becomes the state. Terms of entry and exit, predicated on a default non-belonging. Full of abandonment, and doctors’ hallways. “Pageantry of refusal,” the boredom and brutality of forced feeding, Seroquel surveillance. The patient cannot leave until the body recovers. “Cure” as a eugenic concept, the eradication of what is animal, changeable, what growls and bites. “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship,” Sontag begins her famous work on the flaws of metaphoric thinking about illness, which nevertheless relies itself on a central metaphor of kingdoms, citizens, passports.
5. Bird’s narratives of illness are neither punitive nor sentimental, they are funny and morbid, holy and profane, hyperrealist and dissociative. Illness is not a metaphor, and neither is decolonization. “Without Google, name something The British Empire has not stolen.” Or: “Brandi needs therapy like a grave needs a body. Brandi needs a body.” Like dreams, these poems contain their own atmosphere. Each line break is a hole to fall into, a conversation between surrender and control. In one poem, Jesus’ face merges into the narrator’s. In another, the narrator’s grandmother is “an NDN Christ.*” Watching God watch themselves. Memory blends with mythology, “things that never even happened.”
*NDN here is slang for Indian, as in Indigenous.
6. Like Pitiful, Anne Boyer’s Undying probes the “ideological regime” of illness and its costs — to relationships, to stability, to thinking, to possibility — distributed so unevenly depending on race and gender and class. For Boyer and Bird, disablement is both a political and formal concern. In November 2023, Boyer resigned as the poetry editor of the New York Times, in protest of how its reportage has sanctioned, pacified, and obfuscated Israel’s campaign of genocide and debilitation against Palestinians. At the end of her resignation letter, Boyer wrote: “If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.”
7. “Pain is attentive / & then loses focus,” Bird writes. When I am in pain, as I am now, my mind is full of holes. Bird’s poems are perfect units of attention. Fleshy, charged by hunger and rage. A poem pierces through brain fog. A poem punches a hole in the present. Pain is one way our bodies tell us the world should be different. “When the sick rule the world, mortality will be sexy,” wrote Dodie Bellamy, in her essay of the same name. Pitiful plays a similar reversal. This book is a world ruled by the sick, plagued by the doctors who can’t figure out how to help them.
8. Jackie Wang: “I am on the street waiting for the giant hole to open.”
9. On the other side of the hole of post-memory, “a hole where violence is spoken,” Pitiful gathers its crowd together. The girls who do not remember their dreams. The girls who want to be beautiful and do ugly things. No cops or colonizers. Only the girls who fight themselves. The “destructive & not destroyed.” The girls who shove meat in their pockets. The girls who don’t think they belong in poetry. The girls who are not girls at all.
10. “All memory leads here.” Pitiful’s dream is a gravity that catches all matter.
This article appeared in the 2026 Apr/May issue.