Crohnic

A poetic meditation on what it means to live a medicated life, looking toward sites of nature where life and death exist side by side

Crohnic is a brilliant and moving collection of poems that asks, what is the landscape of a medicated life? From their convalescence in a room that overlooks the North Saskatchewan River, author Jason Purcell thinks ecologically with medical records, prescriptions, and dosages, staying attuned to place and to what it might mean to live a life relying on something—in this case, an interminable course of medication—that hurts you in some ways to help you in others. How does the terrain of life change?

Picking up the threads of sickness first plucked in Swollening, Crohnic charts two years of Purcell's treatment for Crohn's disease, journeying from hospital rooms to bogs and muskeg, places where life and death intermingle and create the conditions for one another's flourishing. This is a world populated by coyotes, ermines, steroids, pine, infusion drips, moss, pills, and ice. These other-than-human beings come together in Crohnic, coalescing into relations that together form a personal narrative of the management of chronic illness.