The Most Common Symptom is Pain
Exploring partnership, motherhood and depression through the natural world, domesticity, the tarot and the zodiac, the poems in The Most Common Symptom is Pain are proudly “A kind of cartography/and just as redundant.” They are about working against one's lesser nature, about working your ass off for love, about working for magic, about “trying to let canyons/be canyons.”
The most common symptom of growth is pain, and it “requires failing, just like sex/and sewing and math do, too.” The first step is simply acknowledgement. These poems are not about escapism; they are about noticing, existing inside of what ails you. In this book “Someone is looking in this mirror,/ searching the dark.”
Through darkness, The Most Common Symptom is Pain seeks balance, knowledge of the self, and a best practice, a type of maintenance for a life that’s worth living: “you will know how to name the sea, the sky, the stars, and you will know what to do with them.” These poems are aching, but they are reaching; they are dishwater and dust and sunlight on a scrappy little garden. They are asking for a way to change. They are a secret discourse reminding you that “The trick to seeing a unicorn is forgiveness.”
Cover art by Rhiannon Admidas Conley
Less Precious
Rhiannon Conley's poems -- at once dark and romantic -- explore the complexities of love, sex, and motherhood through a mixture of personal narrative and zoological description.
"It was barely July and I had just stopped loving you / in the small, precious way that you needed. / I used to be made of wolf’s blood and sea water. / My veins carried this to my hands, / lips and legs. It flowed through me with the moon. / I told you, you used to be precious, magic."
Cover art by Rachel Piwarski.