Boundary pushing, genre reshaping

allostatic load
by Junie Désil

Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2025
$18.95 / 9781772016062

Reviewed by Cathy Ford

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allostatic load is a masterfully difficult book of poems, enhanced by graphic challenges to the common page, with striking memo and questionnaire-style layout in some poems, concrete illustrative pieces in others that create a way into the writer’s experience, and apparently accessible language. It is by no means, however, as ‘easy’ as it looks, nor does it leave the reader at ease. The writer of these poems has done all the work, and done it well, with sharp perception, detailed re-telling, and “picture-making” in the familiar sense of skilled, actualized metaphor, image snapshots, and use of simile. Just as the reading is comfortable, the deeper impression is not. What makes this book of Junie Désil (eat salt | gaze at the ocean) difficult is that it will not let the reader off the hook, or hooks. The hooks of presumption, expectation, distancing, definition, privilege, or lack thereof. 

In the dedication to allostatic load, the author’s intent and gratitude to a sense of community is made clear. These poems are for those, or inspired by those, “who are pushing the boundaries and reshaping the genre.” In the acknowledgements, the author reminds that very particular community, “If I have missed you in the acknowledgements, it is not intentional.” What to make of this determined poet, whose specifics in this collection are so anguished, personal, unusual, and from a unique place and life experience, but whose poems repeatedly delineate eerily familiar feelings, responses, and reactions many readers will identify with?

From a place of sensibility where it can be said we all know too much about the lives of others, this poet’s voice is, unto itself, willing to let the reader in, but only at the same high level of self-interrogation—examining privilege, questioning a prescriptive approach to life and good health, demanding acceptance of the reality of the experience of the writer. To refer to the “harrowing” of another poet’s work, in this book’s case, like that heavy prairie farm frame with iron teeth dragged over plowed land to break the domesticated soil, is apt. While the detail in these poems can be distressing, the writer has shown in-depth feeling and in-depth writing that cannot be denied, but laid out, shared, even while the narrator is sometimes wildly enraged.

Not every writer lets the reader in, in such transparent language or intent. The most difficult narration of these poems—ailing and affliction—is ultimately triumphant or triumphed over. The vocabulary is “proofed” for what it really means, in this writer’s experience. The communication of the experiences in these poems is fully intended to affect the reader.

While intimately personal and daring, the emotion of reaction through received racism, ableism, systemic bias, sexism, and injustice is fully realized. The desperation of searching out help slams into the demeaning and demoralizing demands of forced compliance with medical treatment, even from the supposedly well-meaning.

In reading these poems, one hears the voice of a writer making a life out of whole cloth, denying nothing, refusing to discard or deny, even the most painful experiences of pain, medical disregard, disrespect, assumption, and prejudice. The strength of resilience in these poems is inspirational, as is the considered sense of community, carrying what’s done, with all that comes next in such a challenging life. The whole body compels the brilliant mind, and vice versa. In these poems, that hinged connection is undeniable. Grieving, anxious, solicitous, this allostatically loaded voice, revealing the physiological, emotional, and psychological effects of a person fighting for their life as detailed, is a remarkable lifeforce. 

The genuine and unarguable health issues, and the clear-eyed gaze in these poems, invite the reader to contemplate the desperation of finding healing, both in written and unwritten pursuit. While the story of these poems is the search for being able to understand symptoms, seeking patterns and comprehending chronic stressors, trying to clarify mystery, there is the raging, persistent pursuit of hope despite the “erratic thumping” of the heart. This is a poet compelled to “turn the other cheek, no the face, no the entire body.” These are poems about seeking actual, individualized and understanding health care.

Working “where care was transactional,” the poet learns and disputes a guide to survival, taking the most painful remarks, pinpricks and rejections into the body itself, “look it up—you’re in the dictionary.” The agonized and vibrantly alive voice in these poems—pained not by accident or choice but engaged by necessity—is wryly and fully occupied with “something that will eventually kill you—a medical phenomenon.”

No microaggressions these remarks, but debilitating like chronic inflammation, similar to the repeated, contemptible, patronizing-in-tone advice received from medical professionals, work colleagues, casual acquaintances. Advice that expropriates the mind and the body. The resulting effect simultaneously weakens the fiercest spirit, all too often. While the soul remains sensitive, openly raw and freely existential, it is earthbound by the actual and ongoing receipt of physical pain, panic. 

One is reading the work of an old soul in a suffering body. By “old,” the meaning is empathic with others, even when in excruciating difficulty. These poems suggest carrying forward a remembering, a memory reflective on trauma, spelling it out in the quest for identifying with one another, to search out the places where different but similar issues and effects create understanding. 

As a reader, I found this book of poems defiant, but ultimately hopeful. The terra incognita of the observations, the sufferings of others arise, in a collection that is obsessive but not self-obsessed. In trying to make sense of the personal experiences in these poems, while writing them down, the writer is provoking sympathy, but it is dependent upon precise comprehension of the relevant truths by a reader committed to seeing, hearing, trying to fully grasp the suffering of another person. The reader is moved to a commonality of caring about, caring for, one another, another point of view. To see in the careless but powerful attitudes of colonialism and sexism in medical care, additional harm that is too frequently done. The poetry in this book is weighted not just from an acute consciousness of injustice, but a sharpened construct, an approach to life and artistic creation, seeking relief from pain and fear—acute, repetitive, chronic and cumulative—as well as from the “treatment” received, attempting to nevertheless function in one’s life. Life shortened. 

allostatic load rips the medical grade hypoallergenic tape—non-latex pinking shear cut-end band-aid— right off of “carewashing.” What is revealed is the pretence, the superficial presumptive coaching advice that fronts as medical “due care and attention.” There is a marvellous comprehension of what the art of the poems can achieve in relating the personal in this book: “i mention birds in the same breath as racial trauma. i remember finding an injured bird, its tiny chest heaving and fluttering and beating—wildly—that’s how my chest has always felt. my whole life.” 

The view from the urbanized window of Désil’s life experience looks out over nature, its daily blessings and peaceful persistence. This is a book that speaks to me as a reader, touches and changes deep perceptions, and I hope, reaches many.

Cathy Ford is a poet, fictioniste, and memoirist working predominantly on the long poem, feminist issues, life and death concerns, social justice and peace, and our relationship with this beloved earth. She has published more than fifteen books, including the art of breathing underwater and Flowers We Will Never Know The Names Of—an abc book of the language of flowers and their transliteration, an interpretation of grief and protest based on the Montreal Massacre. Her earlier books are published by blewointment press, Caitlin Press, Harbour Publishing, and Véhicule Press. She lives in Sidney. [Editor’s note: Cathy Ford has reviewed books by Renée Harper, Sharon Thesen, Mona Fertig, Judith Copithorne, bill bissett, Jónína Kirton, and Linda Rogers for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” –E.M. Forster