Able Physiologists Discuss Grief Musculatures

Able Physiologists Discuss Grief Musculatures is a strange and challenging work from physician-poet Shane Neilson and book artist and designer Frances Hunter. Exploring historical approaches to mental illness, and the iconography that has gone along with it, this beautifully constructed chapbook is “a song-critique, an identity-dirge, a question of cure.” A flat back binding with a cloth spine holds original marbled black paper by Frances Hunter (a nod to 18th and 19th century decorated papers), monoprints created for this chapbook by Dorothy Field, and contemporary illustrations bridge the time span of the text and make for one stunning handmade book. Poet Shane Neilson explains: “The theme of this poetry chapbook is the iconography of the face in mental illness – how the ill are seen and recognized by the sign of their face, the signal of their disorder. The poems take famous people from the history of psychiatry (patients, doctors, loved ones of the ill) and give them a stage.”