Pitiful: Poems

“This poem begins where Bulimia ends

or maybe, just maybe, when it started. Where

the differential diagnosis is confused

by decades of self-made violence. Poverty,

colonialism, god, all prisms that will shatter

one day, if not now…”

Part self-interrogation, part confession, part hospital diary, the intense, heartbreakingly frank poems in Brandi Bird’s second collection detail the author’s ongoing struggles with eating disorders and depression, conditions that disproportionately afflict In...