2024
Routledge Handbook of Medicine and Poetry
Publisher: Routledge
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, social scientists, and bio-scientists who collectively inquire into the nature of relationships between medicine and poetry.
2023
Saving
Publisher: Great Plains Press
When my two-year-old develops epilepsy, I struggle to obtain timely medical care for my son. In lyric memoir fashion, Saving shares my family’s journey through the medical system, and also my own personal journey as a father who feels powerless when faced with his child’s illness. It entwines these stories with my personal history of mental illness as a child and my professional experience with disability. By exploring the theme of family, I show that, over time, it is possible to not only escape the wreckage of the past, but to celebrate living with disability in the present.
The Suspect We
Publisher: Palimpsest Press
In The Suspect We, I collaborate with Roxanna to make a documentary poetics concerning pandemic conditions for the mad, neurodivergent, and disabled. Written while the world huddled indoors, The Suspect We is the product of a poetic friendship as well as a reaction to it. Throughout, we query CanLit politics and care deficiencies as mutually dependent while also taking care of one another through their own work and its address. Poems in the book secured The Antigonish Review‘s poetry award and appeared in Prairie Schooner.
The COVID Journals
Publisher: University of Alberta Press
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, and sometimes even joyful, highlight challenges and satisfactions that people will continue to explore and make sense of for years to come.
Carelanding
Because I am a glutton for punishment, I wrote the first scholarly book concerning the intersection of Canadian literature and medicine. I have resolved never to write another.
2022
You May Not Take the Sad and Angry Consolations
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
My sixth trade book of poetry is an archive of wisdom written by a disabled man for his children. You May Not Take the Sad and Angry Consolations gives voice to the experience of living in an ableist society. Weaving together reflections on fatherhood, Walt Whitman’s place in American history, art, and the lingering effects of past trauma, these ringing and raw poems theorize on the concept of shame, its intended purpose, and its effects for and on disabled body-minds. Poems in the book won The Capilano Review’s Robin Blaser Award and appeared in Poetry Magazine.
2021
Poetry in the Clinic: Towards a Lyrical Medicine
Publisher: Routledge
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, previously unexamined, such as place eclipsing time. They articulate a groundbreaking ‘lyrical medicine’ that promotes aesthetic, ethical and political practices as well as noting the often-concealed metaphor cache of biomedicine. Demonstrating that ambiguity is a key resource in both poetry and medicine, the authors anatomise poetic and medical practices as forms of extended and situated cognition, grounded in close readings of singular contexts. They illustrate structural correspondences between poetic diction and clinical thinking, such as use of sound and metaphor.
2019
New Brunswick
Publisher: Biblioasis
My fifth trade book of poems mourns the dead, skewers enduring stereotypes of the province, engages in self-critique, finds time to not-heal and not-understand while allowing my home the final word. One long poem in the book was awarded the Robin Blaser Award by The Capilano Review in 2015 and another poem appeared in The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry 2017.
Constructive Negativity
Publisher: Palimpsest
Poison pill or love letter? Both. More. A unique book that collects together writing from over twenty years, as well as containing new material written for this book alone, Constructive Negativity begins by thinking through the deformations wrought in Canadian poetry by prizes, arguing that the only way to survive this emperor is to speak one’s mind in reviews. The second section covers many Canadian writers with invisible disability. Both sections offer a model of how and why to write criticism, by demonstrating personal investment in the value of art. Essays from the book have appeared in Poetry, Maisonneuve Magazine, Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Notes & Queries, Wordgathering, and many other periodicals.
Margin of Interest
Publisher: Palimpsest
As a poet, I grew up reading the bracing critical prose in PQL’s books of criticism on Canadian literature. With Margin of Interest, I am proud to now have a book in this series that covers poetry written in/of the Maritime region. I respectfully write of Mi’kmaw poetics from the subject position of curious settler while problematizing the settler frame; I add to the theoretical work done on regionalism; and, as always, I write with passionate engagement and bring to bear my own personal history.
Affect Trilogy
All my life, I’ve been told not to mention that I am unwell, that I have been, at times, extremely unwell. Poetry, I find, doesn’t want to listen. It wants to be listening. This trilogy of books thinks through torpor and wildness amidst a context of greater beauty. Whether considering the emotional labour of medicine (Complete Physical), the historiography of psychiatry (On Shaving), or psychosis and carceral care (Dysphoria), these books constitutively declare how hard it is to be in the world.
All available through Porcupine’s Quill
Shane Neilson 