Beth Steidle - When the body betrays it forces you to learn its language, turning patients and kin into spontaneous islands of urgent expertise

Beth Steidle, The Static Herd, Calamari Press, 2014.

www.bethsteidle.com/writing

«When the body betrays it forces you to learn its language, turning patients and kin into spontaneous islands of urgent expertise. Through overlaid registers of plainspeak and medicalese, illustration and dreamscape, The Static Herd enacts a coming to terms with the kaleidoscopic loss that ricochets through a family befallen with grave illness. Hardly maudlin, Beth Steidle’s lyric bravely inserts itself into the hard-fact lexicon of diagnoses and examinations. By turning unfeeling jargon out from within she creates a system for understanding. This debut book, to quote its own author, is ‘a creature that breathes.'»—Corrine Fitzpatrick

 

«The Static Herd is an abnormal tissue of medical records and memory, and a sublime poetic exhumation that precedes the final internment.»—Matt Pieknik

 

«... the intense lyricism of the language is luminous in nature and beautiful and mysterious, as are the William Blakian illustrations...This remarkable volume is like a wondrous field guide to the painful process of entering the interior of loss. And what a fabulous tour it is.»—Chuck Kinder

 

 

We sent our greetings out in every language. With our many tongues we identified ourslelves as children. We asked the darkness if it had eaten. We said to the darkness, goodnight ladies and gentlemen.