Pathemata, or, the Story of My Mouth by Maggie Nelson (Hardback)

£12.99
Available
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9781911717454
Published:
15 May 2025
Format:
Hardback
Number of pages:
80 pages
Dimensions:
205x135x12mm
Weight:
0.173kgs
Author:
This is a dreamlike portrait of a body in struggle to connect with itself and others. As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer. Merging dreams and dailies, this book recounts the narrator's tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss - the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life.

It's not the dream that matters, it's the telling of the dream - the words you choose, the risks you take in externalising your mind

This is a dreamlike portrait of a body in struggle to connect with itself and others. As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer.

Merging dreams and dailies, Pathemata recounts the narrator's tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss - the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life.

With characteristic precision, humour and compassion, Nelson explores the limits of language to describe experience, while also offering a portrait of an unnerving and isolating time in our shared history. A stunning, original experiment in interiority by the adored author of Bluets and The Argonauts, Pathemata is a personal and poetic reckoning with pain and loss, both physical and emotional, as well as an uncanny meditation on love, affliction and resilience.

About the Author: Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of prose and poetry including The Red Parts, Bluets, the National Book Critics Circle Award-winner The Argonauts, and On Freedom. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

More Information
Number of pages 80

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