BLUE ELECTRODE by Margaret Barbour Gilbert

BLUE ELECTRODE by Margaret Barbour Gilbert

(2 customer reviews)

$14.99

 

BLUE ELECTRODE

 

1.
At the moment I am all wired up and
buckled into a $9,000 belt with tape recorder
— getting a 24-hour recording of my brain.
Like Medusa or one of the
Gorgon Ladies, I have over 100 tiny blue
electrodes all over my scalp, wires coming
out of my head and a collar of blue
electrodes around my neck. Paste like clam
dip is smeared through my hair, so
the electrodes will stay in place. I am
planning to call my mother later to see
if she triggers off Seizure Activity.

 

2.
Among plastic flowers
and eisinglass curtains,
a china chest,
she comes bearing gifts
to the glassed-in receptacle,
a visitor to a grave site,
and mourns the seizures
dressed in black.
Yes, my mother thinks to herself,
tying her torn scarf,
the words Epilepsy and Woe
are synonymous.

 

3.
I tie a blue scarf over my head,
so that no one will see the thousands
of tiny wires attached to my skull,
my hair, a mass of twisting snakes,
if I later go out to the grocery.
This is the blue scarf my father
had wanted me to give my mother —
a pale blue the predominant color
with tiny yellow flowers —
I mailed the scarf to her,
but she returned it.

 

 

 

 

*****

 

 

“The poet’s work to establish agency in the midst of sickness is so clear and hard fought, that one is filled with admiration and wonderment at the ability to carry the reader so deep into her journey with all of its subcurrents.”

 

–MARY STEWART HAMMOND – author of Out of Canaan (W.W. Norton, 1991) & Entering History (W.W. Norton, 2016).

 

 

 

*****

 

 

 

“These poems interrogate seizure disorder and recovery, its spectrum, the people around it, family, community. In those waters swim a sense of history, distortion, victimhood, the inevitability of scapegoating, in fact, discrimination and racism. The poems themselves seize. Their strongest light is their willingness to inhabit the very “kindling” of the neurons, “the highway clothed in goldenrod.” Indeed, as the poet writes in “Blue Electrode,” the title poem, “Yes, my mother thinks to herself/ tying her torn scarf,/ the words Epilepsy and Woe/ are synonymous.”

 

–RALPH BURNS – author of but not yet (Lynx House Press, 2017) Winner of The Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, & Ghost Notes (Oberlin College Press, 2000), Winner of The Field Poetry Prize.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Description

BLUE ELECTRODE

by Margaret Barbour Gilbert

$14.99, paper

978-1-64662-540-6

2021

BLUE ELECTRODE artfully explores illness and recovery in a collection of autobiographical episodes, which span a wide range of poetic response to epilepsy and describe the many emotions of a sickness.

MARGARET BARBOUR GILBERT is an award-winning writer from Alabama who lives in New York City. She has published two chapbooks of poems with Finishing Line Press, MY GRANDMOTHER’S ENGAGEMENT RING and BLUE ELECTRODE. A play, A SCENE OF CAPTIVITY WITH WALTZES AND MIRRORS has been staged twice at Harvard’s Agassiz Theater. “Eating Oatmeal” from MY GRANDMOTHER’S ENGAGEMENT RING is included in the Alfred Knopf anthology, CONVERSATION PIECES: POEMS THAT TALK TO OTHER POEMS.

 

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