In What to feel, how to feel, Shane Neilson dazzles in the lyric essay form. Focusing on non-neurotypicality, Neilson investigates his supposed difference of self while also holding to account society’s construction of that difference, moving from his early childhood to adulthood and then back again in terms of a neurodivergent fathering of his own son. Covering subjects that have yet to receive attention in Canadian literature, including how the medical profession discriminates against it...

Why do we fall ill? How do we get better?When his two-year-old develops epilepsy, Shane Neilson, a doctor, struggles to obtain timely medical care for his son. Saving shares his family's journey through the medical system, and also Shane's own personal journey as a father who feels powerless when faced with his child's illness. It entwines these stories with Shane's personal history of mental illness as a child and his professional experience with disabili...

Early in the pandemic, medical personnel were our front lines. What was that like? Through stories, art, and poetry, Canadian health-care workers from across the country recount their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The contributors to The COVID Journals share the determination and fear they felt as they watched the crisis unfold, giving us an inside view of their lives at a time when care itself was redefined from moment to moment. Their narratives, at turns tender, angry, curious, ...

Heralding a new regionalism, New Brunswick interrogates the popular representations of Shane Neilson's home province. Structured as a group of serial long poems, this fifth book by the winner of the 2017 Walrus Poetry Prize recasts the political, economic, and social histories of settler New Brunswick, particularly as they relate to the sacrifices of his parents. As forests are reborn and fields are healed by rest, Neilson insists that though "we want catastrophes of fire," out of...

Meniscus is Shane Neilson’s manic statement, arching backwards through his personal histories and into the current scale of illness: how it prophecizes and destroys. But this book is not solely given to a state. Most of Meniscus is given to love, how it moves, the disaster of chasing it, and how it settles all his accounts.

The Routledge Handbook of Medicine and Poetry draws on an international selection of authors to ask what the cultures of poetry and medicine may gain from reciprocal critical engagement. The volume celebrates interdisciplinary inquiry, critique, and creative expansion with an emphasis upon amplifying provocative and marginalized voices.This carefully curated collection offers both historical context and future thinking from clinicians, poets, artists, humanities scholars, ...

Canadian Literature and Medicine breaks new ground by formulating a series of frameworks with which to read and interpret a national literature derived from the very fabric of that literature – in this case Canadian. Canadian literature is of particular interest because of its consideration of coloniality, Indigeneity, and coincident development alongside a nascent socialized medical system currently under threat from neoliberalism.The first chapters of the book carefully ...

In The Suspect We, Roxanna Bennett and Shane Neilson collaborate to make a documentary poetics concerning pandemic conditions for the mad, neurodivergent, and disabled. Written while the world huddled indoors, The Suspect W is the product of a poetic friendship as well as a reaction to it. Throughout, Bennett and Neilson query CanLit politics and care deficiencies as mutually dependent while also taking care of one another through their own work and its address.

This book explores previously unexamined overlaps between the poetic imagination and the medical mind. It shows how appreciation of poetry can help us to engage with medicine in more intense ways based on ‘de-familiarising’ old habits and bringing poetic forms of ‘close reading’ to the clinic.Bleakley and Neilson carry out an extensive critical examination of the well-established practices of narrative medicine to show that non-narrative, lyrical poetry does different kind of work,...

The New Black is Darian Leader's compassionate and illuminating exploration of melancholyWhat happens when we lose someone we love? A death, a separation or the break-up of a relationship are some of the hardest times we have to live through. We may fall into a nightmare of depression, lose the will to live and see no hope for the future. What matters at this crucial point is whether or not we are able to mourn.In this important an...

Narrative medicine has emerged in response to a commodified health care system that places corporate and bureaucratic concerns over the needs of the patient. Generated from a confluence of sources including humanities and medicine, primary care medicine, narratology, and the study of doctor-patient relationships, narrative medicine is medicine practiced with the competence to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness. By placing events in temporal order, with beg...

Why has the female voice deepened over the last fifty years? Who talks more, men or women? How can a baby in the womb distinguish between different voices?The human voice is the personal and social glue that binds us, and the most important sound in our lives. The moment we open our mouth we leak information about our biological, psychological and social status. Babies use it to establish emotional ties and acquire language, adults to decode mood and meaning in intimate and profess...