Böcker av Brody Parrish Craig

A poetry collection that questions the current construction of psychiatric treatment while speaking through lived experience and advocating for disability justice. The poems of Brody Parrish Craig's new collection upends narratives around current psychiatric treatment models to focus on the lived experience of survivors and to speak toward liberation, abolition, and disability justice. Titled after the author's own medical records, The Patient Is an Unreliable Historian questions the prevailing narrative that the medical industry knows stories of disability and madness better than those who have lived them. Craig uses lyricism to expose the intersection of madness and criminality in contemporary American culture, moving through institutions, community spaces, and loss of kin. Through the course of the collection, the speaker turns toward irreverence and interrogation, carves out their own freedom, and challenges the script of the patient, the mad, and the "criminal." These poems deconstruct the "patient" to set the person free.

"Boyish engages what once thought impossible: a reconciliation of southern and queer identities, of upbringing, rebellion, and revival. The coming to Jesus moments of looking back, of liberation & reckoning. Each page exterior & interior revolutions. To carve space between. To cut-up the absence. To find oneself carried over graveled creekside into the first mouth's babble. As much subconscious as embodied desire, change holds within the white space and the formal play-language twisting the unspeakable alongside dense sonnets, a thicket of warmth & dissonance that holds a mirror up to puddled overpass & river. The landscapes of city's dystopia meeting the queer pastoral, where conservation often means what must burn down"--