This was a weird collection, but it was a unique one. It is poetry based on a hypochondriac's lab results. The musings are inspired by enzymes, metals, bacterial colonies, etc. I can't say I loved reading it, but I can say I don't regret it.

Anatomic is a poetry book that was released this year. However, it is not your run of the mill poetry collection. Author Adam Dickinson made his body undergo severe physical strain just so he could deliver this blood-curdling book. No, it’s not filled with horror but it is bound to make you squirm in your seat, to fill you with discomfort. As Ernest Hemingway put it, “There is nothing to writing. You sit in front of a typewriter and bleed”.

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Dickinson took this advice far too literally. For this book, he experimented with his body, taking it to extremes that should not have been taken. It was beneficial because he created something original and bloodcurdling.
The publisher’s synopsis for Anatomic is as follows, the poems of Anatomic have emerged from biomonitoring and microbiome testing on the author’s body to examine the way the outside writes the inside, both harmful and necessarily. This information and research has been turned into a chemical/microbial autobiography that explores the subject as an assemblage of nonhuman objects and actors. All of the chemicals for which the author is tested are widely present in the environment and believed to exist in most humans to varying degrees. By focusing on the ‘outside’ that’s ‘inside,’ Dickinson draws attention to the permeable and coextensive nature of the body with its environment and the consequent implications for linking the human to the nonhuman and the personal to the global. Working with the hormone as a compositional method, the poems deliberately combine biographical details (the author’s exposure to various chemicals, his diet, and lifestyle as contributors to his microbial health) with historical details (famous spills, accidental poisonings, military applications, and attempted political assassinations).

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The prompt for the book itself is fascinating. I had never heard of poetry borne from the monitoring of the biological circumstances of the body. As for the writing, it was not the most transcendental or mind-blowing style. The format of the book is of chapters named “Hormones” interrupted by the chapters named by a variety of bacteria. One of the most poignant points in the book is on page 16, where Dickinson recounts that he filled seventy-six vials of blood in one go, and was helped by someone who was not trained in that realm of medicine. The university where this happened later changed its policy to prevent this from happening again.
I liked this book, no more and no less. What makes it good is the idea behind it, not the actual writing. At times, the poetry reads like a jumble of words that aren’t exactly related. But even then, there is the occasional poem that manages to spark something inside you, that possess something of an aura.
Overall, I would recommend this book to people who like the intersectionality between science and poetry, that manages to be technical with still having some musicality.
Notable poems include Mouthfeel, Delta (Page 31), Commensalism (which reads like the excerpt of some long forgotten life), OCD, Pack Your Bags, and Spectrum.

Rating: 3 Stars

Love, Luna

Interesting and ambitious concept, but I had trouble with the execution.

Some poems felts like a random word generator had gone rogue. And for some that is probably the nature of poetry, but it just didn’t work for me. Some pieces in this collection were however informative: e.g. the traces of paraben and other toxic substances found in our bodies because of our environmental interactions; but the poems drawn as “inspiration” from these chemicals just left me confounded, in a not so good way.

I almost dnf-ed this book but pushed through for the sake of Netgalley, where I got a copy from the publishers to review.

Poetry usually moves me, this unfortunately did not.

I really believe that science and poetry are a wonderful and underappreciated combination, the latter capable of finding new ways of describing the former and making it accessible. I didn't think "Anatomic" was able to do that, despite how much thought and planning, as well as thought, personal reflection, and possibly even experience that Dickinson put into the collection. I found it almost impossible to find an entry point into these poems, and what I did manage to pick out felt like disjointed scraps that were part of a larger whole that I had no access to. I ended up thinking back to Madhur Anand's "A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes", which I thought was a much more successful collection in that regard, as it was able to do what Dickonson's "Anatomic" ultimately, for me, failed at, namely finding a balance between science and the "humanities", the technical and the emotional, or even making the technical seem relevant enough to care about.

Many thanks go to Dickinson, Coach House, and Netgalley for the free copy of this book in exchange for my unbiased review. After finishing I gave myself a few days to process it. It's such a unique project I wanted to rate it five stars, but I just don't know how I feel about the writing itself. Dickinson is certainly open about his findings and his feelings about how the experiment affected him. But maybe I just don't know enough about the science behind the it to get any nuances? I would have never made the complete connection in Hormone if it hadn't been explained at the end. The photos were definitely a bonus. Those really added to the results on the pages, well what I could gather anyway. congratulate Dickinson on being so adventurous. This wasn't easy I can tell.

Not quite my type of poetry. I'm sure there is an audience out there for it though. I like the science specificness of the poetry though.