Odes to Lithium

by Shira Erlichman

Overview

Captivating poems and visual art seek to bring comfort and solidarity to anyone living with Bipolar Disorder.

In this remarkable debut, Shira Erlichman pens a love letter to Lithium, her medication for Bipolar Disorder. With inventiveness, compassion, and humor, she thrusts us into a world of unconventional praise. From an unexpected encounter with her grandmother’s ghost, to a bubble bath with Bjӧrk, to her plumber’s confession that he, too, has Bipolar, Erlichman buoyantly topples stigma against the mentally ill. These are necessary odes to self-acceptance, resilience, and the jagged path toward healing. With startling language, and accompanied by her bold drawings and collages, she gives us a sparkling, original view into what makes us human.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948579032
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	09/17/2019
Pages:	100
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Shira Erlichman is a writer, visual artist, and musician. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed Reader, Nomadic Press, The Rumpus and PBS NewsHour's Poetry Series, among others. She earned her BA at Hampshire College and was awarded a residency by the Millay Colony, the James Merrill Fellowship by the Vermont Studio Center, and the Visions of Wellbeing Focus Fellowship at AIR Serenbe. Her first children's book Be/Hold is forthcoming from Penny Candy Books. She is half of the Odes for You Tour with poet Angel Nafis. As a musician she's performed across the US, sharing stages with TuNe-YaRdS, CocoRosie and Mirah. She's independently released seven albums, including Subtle Creature which premiered in BUST Magazine and was hailed as a "spectacular mystery." Born in Israel, raised in Massachusetts, she now lives in Brooklyn. Learn more at www.officialshira.com.

Table of Contents

I Knife-Flower

Snakes in Your Arms 3

Side Effects 5

Beatrice 6

Cliff 8

They 9

Needle 11

Ghazal, Interrupted 12

Unrequited Teacher 13

Unwished for 14

Side Effects E 17

The Knife-Flower 19

Natural 21

II Cockroach

I'm Sitting with Björk in My Bathtub 25

Dear Dr. Stone 26

There Were Others 29

Margot 30

The Two Things I Remember from Freshman Physics Class 31

Mind over Matter 33

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Phineas Gage 35

Portrait of a Release 39

Someone Else's Mother 44

Rose 45

Aftertaste 46

III Baby & I

Daveen 49

The Tiger 50

Lightweight 51

In the Hands of 53

On This End 54

The Watchman 56

Postscript to Mania 58

A Serious Case 59

Baby & I 60

Conversation with K. 62

Perfect 64

The Runner 65

Potion 66

If You Were Someone 68

Chloe 69

IV The Monk

89 Lines on a Bruise 73

Excuse 75

Barometer 77

How the Jellyfish Prospered 79

Pink Noise 81

The Monk 87

Editorial Reviews

Through her nonlinear narrative of hospitalization, treatment and everyday life, Erlichman turns a confessional self-portrait of crisis into a chemical, chimerical joyride toward self-acceptance…"There is no question like the body," Erlichman writes, and Odes to Lithium deserves praise for its unrelenting asking.

The New York Times Book Review - Emilia Phillips

Shira’s poems transmit experience that nearly defies language, leaving the reader drenched with a new reading of the human: the effects of the mind’s rupture, the enigma of the body’s messages, the terror of one’s own infinitely ingenious yet alien logic. The voice of these pages comments wryly on others’ wary, frightened reactions that increase anguish in the name of helping. The poems trace encounters with mental illness that could not be encompassed by anything but Shira’s honed and startling language and her visual accompaniment of images, each page burnished into a glittering object.” —Annie G. Rogers, Ph.D., Author of A Shining Affliction, The Unsayable, and Incandescent Alphabets

“Odes to Lithium is a remarkable book: it is beautiful, deeply perceptive, haunting, and original. It is wonderful.”—Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind and Pulitzer Finalist, Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire

“Oh, Radiance. Survival and Surviving Field. How rare, an Eye like this, so able to access its marrow language—original, honest, dear, strange. These poems document and enact processes of finding a language imaginative and struggling enough to carry one’s life. Moving us through imagistic splay and shift, the line is Erlichman’s measure: ‘I know what the sea knows / with the bottom of its mind / unfathomed.’ These poems, I think, are little ‘sight’-engines—miraculous, fevered, whirring things. I’m astonished by breath and lasting at all. I ‘pull a flower / from her skull / & weave it into mine.’ I love her way, her mind.” —Aracelis Girmay

From the Publisher