Emily Paige Wilson
ISBN: 978-1-949099-09-6
23 pages

"In this engaging and moving collection, Emily Paige Wilson mythologizes the thinking, feeling, and embodied self, balancing myth-making with lucid and lyric first-person utterances in which the speaker unfolds what ails her: anxiety, cysts, infections, aches. These poems — as wise as they are searching, as tender as they are fierce — come in a dazzling variety of forms and voices, offering us many angles on their subject, which is, ultimately, the pain of inhabiting a body and mind that feel things acutely and relentlessly. With the empath's capacity to experience others' suffering as intimately as her own, Wilson gives the lie to the notion that hypochondria arises from obsessive self-focus, revealing a set of harder but perhaps more hopeful truths. First, compassion is a lonely business if not reciprocated. Second, true empathy makes distinctions between my flesh and yours, my fate and yours, moot. In the end, the book's question might be this: how can we live less fearfully, more joyfully in ailing, aging, vulnerable, desiring bodies? And the answer might be together.

— Melissa Crowe, author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor


"Your body is not your own. This chapbook gives language to that truth, which is often so close it feels languageless. Wilson's magpie-like writing gives words to the many other owners of your most intimate space — the partners who touch your body in an effort to derive pleasure, the family living and dead who gave you your chronic illnesses and your nose, and the body which seems to own and speak only to itself. Hypochondria, Least Powerful of the Greek Gods ably distinguishes real pain from fake pain and identifies the pain of having to translate the story about your body's pain so others may understand you. It allows that every way we're able to tell of our bodies or understand one another's pain is worthwhile and has infinite power, no matter how distorted, understated, or silent the transmission. Wilson posits that generosity may be the cure to what ails us, and I believe her.

— Lauren Clark, author of Music for a Wedding

If Hypochondria couldn't heal her own body, she had wanted to heal his. Innocently enough at first — lathering lotion on his dry arms, his fingers turned a green jerky by salt water. Exfoliating the dead skin of his feet with coral — exoskeleton of tiny teeth. He had found this tender yet trying. Soon she was running a diagnostic of his every move: a doctor's call for each snore that sounded too short of breath. How could their sex life not diminish after this? She said she had wanted to protect him, but he heard perfect and rolled over in bed. She should have learned from the humans how much should be left unsaid to a lover. It's been two weeks now and they sleep not even touching knees. She dreams every night of mermaids, still young and healthy enough to care about polishing their black opal scales, about curling the high shine of their tresses into bright seahorse tails.