Waking up to Thrutopia: poems and essays

by Conny Borgelioen

Yesterday’s path makes for unsure footing as water presses in. Meadows flower with mussels and whelks, old footpaths silt up and disappear, the coastline creeps forward.

Inspired by the concept of Thrutopia, this collection of mainly poems and a few essays is about trying to get to a better place.

Haunted by a chronic illness, the poet tracks her journey through difficult times and questions the state of the world around her. As a tender rebellion starts to take place, the poet seeks to come to terms with her and humanity’s true nature.

60 pages, Paperback

Published June 16, 2023

About the author

I'm a poet, essayist and artist living in Belgium.

My hometown is the chocolate-box city of Bruges. I live there with my two pets: chronic fatigue syndrome and neurodivergence.

My work has appeared in Halfway Down The Stairs, Tint Journal, Kaleidoscope, The Winged Moon, Rogue Agent, and the Emma Press Anthology of Illness.

You can find me blogging on Substack @ Tender Rebellion.

Reviews

[Elizabeth Gauffreau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Waking up to Thrutopia: Poems and Essays by Connie Borgelioen is the work of a poet In full command of her craft and well-versed in philosophy, mythology, and history, liberally drawing from each to create an associative arc moving through the victimhood of chronic illness to acceptance–if not comfort–with her own body and the world around her.

Serving as the unifying principle for the collection is philosopher Rupert Read’s concept of “thrutopia,” which posits that utopia is achieved in the striving, not the attainment, because true utopia does not exist. Borgelioen ably demonstrates the folly of trying to impose utopia on a community of fallible humans in “Brook Farm, Massachusetts, US, 1841-1846”:

“A life far beyond humdrum and filled with wild
and wondrous hopes turned out to be a fly
made of dust, sculptural on the window frame.”

While the poet’s foreword led me to believe that these highly personal poems would be confessional in the spirit of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, I found them much more in the spirit of Emily Dickinson’s “telling it slant.”

In my first read-through of the collection, I encountered several terms I was unfamiliar with. Although I tried to ascertain their meaning from the context, I felt I was missing something. I read the collection again and looked up any terms I didn’t know. Looking up unfamiliar words gave me my way into the poems, and I’d encourage other readers do the same.

For example, in the first poem, Doggerland is used as a metaphor for leaving the solid ground we take for granted to enter chronic illness and learn to live well, albeit differently. Without knowing that Doggerland refers to the now-submerged land that once connected Great Britain and continental Europe, the metaphor, and thereby the experience, of the poem had escaped me the first time I read it.

After their introduction in “Doggerland,” land and water imagery serve as leitmotifs throughout the collection. What they represent is variable, just as the appearance of our external world is variable, depending on our internal state. In fact, much of the imagery has a surreal quality to it that reminds me of Freda Kohlo’s illness and chronic pain paintings that depict her relationship with her damaged body in often surrealistic ways. From “Fed from the Breast”:

“I drew milk
from a cardboard cloud,
always falling

though layers
unseen.”

One of the standout pieces in the collection for me was “The funny funeral,” an essay in which the speaker goes to the seaside with her mother to spread her late father’s ashes. The descriptive prose is exquisite, and the understated emotion moved me deeply. Another standout of the collection was “Today or tomorrow” a paeon to life, possibility, and hope.

I highly recommend Thrutopia to readers who appreciate poetry that seeks to transform painful personal experience through metaphor, including mythological allusion as metaphor. These poems have a great deal of depth that will reveal new insights with multiple readings.

[Sun Jansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve loved Conny Borgelioen’s writing and her credo of “tender rebellion” for years so I was over the moon to finally have this book in my hands. Her subjects (and the concept of ‘Thrutopia’ she riffs on) often resonate on a personal level with my own experience of chronic illness, but they also always pack a surprise. I’m drawn to the kaleidoscopic quality of her perspectives (and prose, see the layered, transcendent “Submerged”). The selection here is consistently imaginative, sometimes even whimsical, but also sharply barbed. Above all it grounds us in the natural world where all of us need to arrive together. There’s a mycorrhizal little manifesto of love in here that I find wonderfully subversive: “You must commit to loving with such a clarity / that even the graceless are pulled out of their muddle.”