Hemicrania

In Hemicrania, poet Therese Gleason reaches out through the "half-headed pain" of the migraineur, despite (or rather, because of) "her head a cracked bell/ that wouldn't stop ringing." Like the two halves of the brain, this chapbook succeeds by dualities. Both thematically cohesive and formally expansive, Hemicrania tells the story, on one side, of the mostly male failures of medicine, and on the other, of the matrilineal inheritance of suffering "which women must endure." Borrowing languag...