“All this time, and I was still alive”: On Maggie Nelson’s ‘Pathemata Or, The Story of My Mouth’ - Chicago Review of Books

“All this time, and I was still alive”: On Maggie Nelson’s ‘Pathemata Or, The Story of My Mouth’ - Chicago Review of Books

Before I started writing this review, I dreamt I was writing it. In the sweaty haze of a migraine – whereupon every emergence into consciousness I tried to drop back into unconsciousness to not feel the drilling pain in my skull – my unconscious pieced together fragments of my waking life. These pieces came together in a likely incoherent argument that Maggie Nelson’s Pathemata, Or, the Story of My Mouth was both simultaneously authentic to, and…