Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth

by Maggie Nelson

Overview

Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth is an experiment in interiority written in the pandemic studio. Something of a companion piece to 2009’s Bluets, Pathemata merges a pain diary chronicling a decade of jaw pain with dreams and dailies, eventually blurring the lines between embodied, unconscious, and everyday life.

In scrupulously distilled prose, Pathemata offers a tragicomic portrait of a particularly unnerving and isolating moment in recent history, as well as an abiding account of how it feels to inhabit a mortal body in struggle to connect with others. Formally inspired by Hervé Guibert’s The Mausoleum of Lovers, and conceptually guided by Gilles Deleuze’s notion of artist as symptomologist, Pathemata is yet another urgent innovation from Maggie Nelson in the art of life-writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798891060111
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	04/01/2025
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Maggie Nelson is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. She first published Bluets with Wave Books in 2009 - in 2015, the book was named by Bookforum one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years; in 2024, it was adapted into an acclaimed play staged at the Royal Court Theater of London. Her other nonfiction titles include Like Love: Essays and Conversations (2024), On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021; named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), the National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts (2015; named by the New York Times one of the top 100 books of the 21st Century), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011; named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007), and Jane: A Murder (2005). A 2016 MacArthur “genius” fellow, she currently teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. Her newest book, Pathemata, or The Story of My Mouth, is forthcoming with Wave in April 2025.

Read an Excerpt

I get up first to be alone, and also because my jaw hurts too much to stay in bed.

 

Each morning it is as if my mouth has survived a war—it has protested, it has hidden, it has suffered.

It has floated, its miniscule points of contact have hit and repelled, pain has shocked then pooled up around the joint.

Rather than each other, my teeth find cheek, which they masticate, leaving in their wake two mountainous ridges.

I shove the sheet into my mouth to know that I am still here, still rooted to the crust.

 

When H is home, which is about half of the time these days, I apologize to him for the white splotches on the comforter’s rim.

He says it’s okay, they just make him sad.

As I tiptoe to the kitchen, I “bite check,” which I’ve been instructed not to do, but I do it anyway, to make sure my top and bottom teeth are still in the same mouth, lost cousins of the same star.

 

 

He has pulled the car over on a rural highway to help a turtle cross the road.

We are on a blind incline, so there is a significant risk of them both getting hit by an oncoming car.

He treats the turtle with tenderness and urgency, more tenderness and urgency than he has ever shown toward me.

I wait in the passenger seat, watching the heat steam off the asphalt.

I don’t care if the turtle lives, but I pretend that I do.

I am trying to be loved.

Editorial Reviews

Previous Praise

 

Bluets

Balancing pathos with philosophy, she created a new kind of classicism, queer in content but elegant, almost cool in shape.
Hilton Als, The New Yorker

It’s an impossible book to describe without simply handing it to you; it is, hackneyed as it is to say, a book to be experienced. I can only report that I am reading it again and again, that the resonances between the (seemingly) disparate propositions are startling and emotional, that I suspect your reaction will be different and also quite wonderful.
Peter Rock, The Rumpus

Nelson's expressive style springs from her subject as much as the content, in turn, inflects her vocabulary, tone and structure. Seeking such reciprocity—no less an ideal than, say, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”—may radically redefine poetry, as it increasingly becomes the genre that is not one.
Albert Mobilio, Bookforum

 

From the Publisher

★ 2025-03-21
A compact return to the personal by one of today’s sharpest literary minds.

Following two recent works of cultural criticism, Nelson’s new text swings and sings back to the intimate and personal. Her quest to alleviate persistent, consuming orofacial pain serves as a narrative backbone assembled from a series of treatment plans, including Botox, a tongue-tie frenectomy, and even the suggestion to tape her mouth shut while sleeping. As she collects recommendations for pain management that veer from the surgical to the “woo-woo”—each promising accurate diagnosis and permanent deliverance—Nelson drifts between the tangible sensation of her pain and the surreality of her dreams. Her search for relief swells around the puncture wound of the coronavirus, and her prose echoes the nebulous space and abrupt transitions between specifics of time, place, interrupted activity, and the singularity and absurdity of that period. Tensions and tenderness in her relationships with her partner, her son, and a dear friend on the verge of a lonely death are atomized by the pandemic, dancing in the shadows alongside twisted nightmares, reflections on her career, and visits to dentists, therapists, and other healers. While the text is short, it packs plenty of Nelson’s signature power punches of brilliance and shrewd humor, driving the reader to look between carefully constructed lines that twitch with secrets and memories held and defended. The author’s audit of her physical pain, its undulating waves, and its stubborn betrayal of and distraction to her body and mind serves as a conduit for discerning the necessity of a person’s mouth, voice, and words, cautioning against both exhausting one’s words and stifling a person’s speech, revealing both the power and burden of what is said and what is not.

Dense and striking, to be savored and reread.

Kirkus Reviews