296
by Cecily Schuler
SIZE: 40 Pages, 8.25" x 5.25"
PRICE: $15.00
Some storytellers adapt their telling to better fit the audience, a tailor-made experience that can comfort and exhilarate them. Other storytellers—like Cecily Schuler—adapt storytelling to fit their particular lens, utilizing the craft of story to make the audience better.
296 don’t flinch ever. The reading experience, and it is an experience, is harrowing, heartbreaking, and defiant as a finger in your chest. Some of these pieces are initiation stories, exposing the reader to being diagnosed as a teenager with multiple mental health diagnoses (296 is the DSM Diagnostic Code for Bipolar Disorder). The combo of poetry and prose pieces approach in different ways their [Cecily does not answer to gender-binary pronouns] being initiation into and grappling with the diagnoses.
The prose pieces are personal essays so expertly crafted that even excerpting them provides a challenge:
“I didn’t want to live like this. This was a new kind of lack of control…I also didn’t want to live under the careful eye of those who would gaslight my reality so blatantly under the guise of care. What I was experiencing was absolutely true for me. But the doctors could only inform me based on what research had told them – not what I was telling them. The doctors said this is what needed to happen. These meds help, they said. I had to stay on my meds, they said. This was the only way that didn’t involve electric shock or physical isolation, they said. It was somehow better this way. But this didn’t feel any better. Just terrible in a different, more terrifying way.”
The line-broken, image and rhythm pieces explore the curatorial spaces of both the page and imagination, becoming visual representations of control: the page’s margins, the margins they enforce upon the words, and the words themselves escaping the pre-conceived expectations of poetics. Cecily trains us to read their works, giving a texture and gradient to mental health issues that goes so far beyond personal narrative that each moment becomes a translated, felt thing.
One particular piece, [TAKE THIS], makes that title (and the directions for use on the lithium) its refrain. “Take this with food” sprawls into “Take this and /forget how to feel. Take this because /you’re broken. Take this because we said /so. Take this or we will make you. Take /this or we will take you away and make /you.”
But the pieces go beyond personal narrative, hoping to expose through their experiences the roots and origins of their particular and larger mental illnesses: systemic misogyny, physical and emotional trauma, oppression, blaming, shunning, isolation, violence. In naming the culprits, the poetry gains a defiant authority best manifest in “(PRAYER)”:
concentrate,
concentrate,
focus on
what you learned, what you have
deciphered. Read your tattoos, review
your scars, they remind you, over
and over, you have lived.
You are not a period, you are
a semicolon, a comma, a dot
dot dot. You continue. It will never
always be like this. Dichotomy
is dissolving, there is so much
color and spectrum, you are ultra
violet in your body, you are willing
to stay, even when your head is a furnace,
when your mind has been consumed,
when you can’t edit or revise or make something
pretty or palatable or lend half an inch to giving
a hell how this sounds, when all you can do is be
real with right now, when all you can do is write
into the madness, Laugh again
at the times they told you
you were making this shit up, that you were
not real. Laugh....
It was a unique honor to make this book for Cecily. Their first chapbook, The Weight of Lies and Water (2013), featured photographs they had taken in Florida of a flock breaking from the treeline at dusk in a sense-deranging confluence of nature. Attempting to pay tribute both to the first collection and the metaphor captured by camera lens, the birds became the visual representation of the “gentle fl[ying] off” that comes from taking the medication as well as a self-identity defined by diagnoses flying off. The birds are made from a label collage made by the author and the binding attempts to mimic birdfeet. The book’s curved edges mimic the rounded edges of medication, furniture, etc.
Pressing 296 into a book offers various challenges, all of which were fun and important. This work deserved attention to detail and was done so lovingly, with both appreciation for the poet and their poems.
While the books were pressed in limited runs [296 may soon be part of a larger collection] there are still a few available. I cannot recognize Cecily and their work more vigorously.
—GM