Poetics of the Tumor
Review by Josh A. Brewer
Elizabth T. Gray Jr.’s After the Operation explores what happens when part of the brain gets removed (literally and literarily) from the author or poetic “I”. Gray reminds us that poetry on the page metastasizes (initially) in our noggins…but in what lobe or which crackle of electricity? Mere psychological realism seeks to recreate a character’s thoughts through stream of consciousness. But what about the brain, the actual organ of those thoughts? Gray finds the poetic self in a metaphorical corpus callosum between the confessional and the clinical.
This isn’t just a poetic confessional or psychological revelation of the mind. It’s clinical disclosure, which reveals the synaptic aesthetics of brain/body/poem.
Gray is a lauded graduate of Harvard Law School and translator of ancient Persian. Her brain impressed me (and many readers) before her operation, not least with her poetry. The first words we encounter in After the Operation have no title, heading, context, or page number. As we read, then, we realize that this is a foreword that acts as a sort of frontispiece—placed before the usual front matter. It’s also an imprimis, written by a neuroscientist and poet. “Interspersed with narratives from her hospital record, Gray encodes a journey through the biopsychology of identity—physical, spiritual, artistic” writes Dawn McGuire, MD, who also calls the book brilliant “riveting, utterly original.” It’s sort of an introduction cum blurb, so readers might want to skip it, preferring to gather their own impressions of the book (returning only later to this false start). What will the reader find next?
Poems, journal entries, and doctor notes swim into and out of the pages unpredictably. Sometimes we find dates, untitled tidbits, some beginning with the titular “After the Operation…” These serve as gambits or sinews. For example:
(After the operation,
there were three birds
outside on the ledge […]
‘This omen
is for the others,’
I said, pointing
across the volcanoes to the
cancered and the dead)
But who are these others? Interlocutors appear and disappear throughout the book, though sometimes it isn’t clear who the narrator addresses: “’Weep for Neith, Nephythys, / Selkit, Isis,’ I told them.” I confess that these allusions lost me from time to time. I felt pulled away from the poem, and the notes in the back of the book did not satisfy, so I ended up on Google. Other verbal exchanges in the book seem more accessible: “’Winter will grow back’, she said / ‘Your tumor will not,’ they said.”
The book also presents the reader with “Physician’s Progress Notes” that include phrases such as “an anterior skull base meningioma at the planum sphenoidale” (emphasis mine). Thus, the poet delivers a vocabulary lesson in anatomy. But she also renders lyrical narratives of decisions made by both the treatment team and the patient-poet. As a skull is covered with easy-to-miss muscles, her poetry moves inside its own skin, subtly, like cognition itself.
I highly recommend After the Operation to a wide readership. It will appeal to literary critics working in cognitive studies and even philosophers of mind-body connections, survivors of brain surgery or trauma, and poets pondering the mysterious origins of words themselves.
Josh A. Brewer studies part time at Harvard University and currently serves as Visiting Faculty at Purdue University. He has taught writing at University of Miami, University of South Carolina, Tennessee State, and Aquinas College. He published a book, Writers Resist, with Chatter House Press (2017). His writing appears in RHINO, Poetry Quarterly, Natural Bridge, Booth, Southeast Rev., Yemassee, Poets Against War, and Sargasso.
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