Stroke, Stroke by Marcella Remund

The poems in Marcella Remund’s latest collection Stroke, Stroke speak to us from a country not many of us have visited. It is rare to find someone who can articulate darkness. The kind of pitch black where you can’t see your hands in front of you. Remund is one of those people. Informed by bravado and bravery, there is no false sentimentality in this collection. To read these poems is to “know yourself part stranger” and to recognize that frailty and resistance are mirror images of each other. 

 —Eve Joseph, author of Quarrels, The Startled Heart, and The Signature of Things (thalamic ischemic stroke, 2013) 

This isn’t a self-help book about stroke recovery, but something better, and more important. With pain, fear, frustration, humor, and ultimately, eloquence, love, and hope, Marcella Remund brings us into the mind of a stroke victim, lets us see it— with wonderful, specific language, vivid words, lustrous imagination and deep-feeling emotion. She writes about what it means to “be held captive in a body that no longer recognizes your authority.” She raises tough questions, philosophical questions, but then shows us the courage, hard work, and self-understanding that occur in rebuilding and re-learning. Yes, medicine and science know more now than they ever have about how our brains work, about what goes wrong, about the long trip back from trauma, but we still need poets to explain how those things feel, and Remund does it not just very well, but beautifully well. 

 —Dana Yost, author of Free-Fall, Grace, and In Your Head (ischemic stroke, 2019)