Yours, Purple Gallinule

"Ewa Chrusciel's fourth book in English, Yours, Purple Gallinule, playfully explores health and illness as they are culturally constructed. Using research about various bird species, clinical understandings of mental afflictions and their treatment through history, Chrusciel maps various diagnostics onto an array of avian species. Intended as a lyrical satire, the book is a reflection on a society that tends to over-diagnose, misdiagnose, over-medicate. Among the questions these poems ask is: What does it mean to be unique, to accept pain and suffering as a fact of life? On the pages of Yours, Purple Gallinule, we encounter birds, a poet, and a psychiatrist who diagnoses birds with various mental afflictions. The psychiatrist undergoes a series of conversions as she realizes that the point is not to classify thoughtlessly, but to "make music instead"-to dwell in astonishment. Birds evade the anthropomorphization of psychiatrists - and of poets - when psychiatrist and poet become one. The anthropomorphization goes in reverse, and the human being becomes more "other," more avian. Like Noah's dove, it proclaims a new covenant, with a twig in its beak and a message: "We are all mad; some more than others, but no one is spared the affliction. And the madder we are, the more sacred.""--