Anatomic

by Adam Dickinson

The poems of Anatomic have emerged from biomonitoring and microbiome testing on the author's body to examine the way the outside writes the inside, whether we like it or not. Adam Dickinson drew blood, collected urine, swabbed bacteria, and tested his feces to measure the precise chemical and microbial diversity of his body. To his horror, he discovered that our "petroculture" has infiltrated our very bodies with pesticides, flame retardants, and other substances. He discovered shifting communities of microbes that reflect his dependence on the sugar, salt, and fat of the Western diet, and he discovered how we rely on nonhuman organisms to make us human, to regulate our moods and personalities. Structured like the hormones some of these synthetic chemicals mimic in our bodies, this sequence of poems links the author’s biographical details (diet, lifestyle, geography) with historical details (spills, poisonings, military applications) to show how permeable our bodies are to the environment. As Dickinson becomes obsessed with limiting the rampant contamination of his own biochemistry, he turns this chemical-microbial autobiography into an anxious plea for us to consider what we’re doing to our world -- and to our own bodies.

Genres: Poetry, Read For School

155 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 24, 2018

Reviews

[BAM doesn’t answer to her real name · Rating 3 out of 5]

Netgalley #28

Many thanks go to Dickinson, Coach House, and Netgalley for the free copy of this book in exchange for my unbiased review.

After finishing I gave myself a few days to process it. It's such a unique project I wanted to rate it five stars, but I just don't know how I feel about the writing itself. Dickinson is certainly open about his findings and his feelings about how the experiment affected him. But maybe I just don't know enough about the science behind the it to get any nuances? I would have never made the complete connection in Hormone if it hadn't been explained at the end.
The photos were definitely a bonus. Those really added to the results on the pages, well what I could gather anyway.
I congratulate Dickinson on being so adventurous. This wasn't easy I can tell.

[m · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly white man talking about the toxins in his body I respect the concept and great to be aware of this but I wish he went deeper into what the statistics meant also what this means for marginalized communities there were some (if not a lot) of points in the book where he really missed the mark and the point privilege he had to speak on toxins in a “global” way ig. :/

[Chanel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this as an ARC on NetGalley.

More like 3.5 Stars.

I loved the concept of this book: using microbiology to inspire poetry in somewhat biographical anecdotes. I feel that the author truly makes the reader think of the ways we create and interact with or world, and then what that does to us chemically and biologically. Thinking of the ways that the world around us alters us on a genetic level is really both fascinating and frightening.

I also really liked the way the author played with form and structure throughout this compilation. There was a clear flow of ideas and the threads throughout the pieces were evident. I can definitely see how re-reading these pieces, one could get more and more out of them each time.

Some of the pieces I liked, but as a whole the concept and structure was better than the pieces themselves individually. Something about it just wasn’t my favorite.

Overall, thought-provoking, original, and stylistically unique pieces.

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

super interesting, even if it was often difficult to understand. this collection takes "the personal is political" and fucking RUNS with it. tentative 3.5 stars

fave poem: circulation

fave line: "Hope / is such a strange / evolutionary adaptation. / What selective pressures / must have been / its shepherd, / what drinking glass / with an envelope / placed over the top / carrying a spider outside?" (from "hormone")

[Amy LeBlanc · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection didn't work for me the way I'd hoped. From what I can tell, the author doesn't have any actual illnesses or conditions that would give insight to the physical and emotional toll of medical testing and the experience of being ill (if that's incorrect, I'll totally revise my thoughts on this). I'm not that interested in reading about an able-bodied man willingly and intentionally undergoing tests/medical procedures for the sake of writing experimental poetry about their body/the invasiveness of medicine/the exhaustion of documenting everything to do with the body/fluid samples/colonoscopies/food journals, etc. Some folks don't have a choice about these procedures and we're certainly not being handed any awards or given any kudos for doing them. Unfortunately, Anatomic reads as though the author wants to be sick in order to write poetry about it.

[Neil Mae · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be honest, sometimes I didn't understand what the hell he was yapping about, but what I did understand was just ok (⁠*⁠﹏⁠*⁠;⁠)

[Dani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super interesting, haven't enjoyed poetry this much in a while. It was hard to put down the book. Involves social commentary woven with powerful personal narrative that ties it all together and keeps you reading. All of this is simultaneously told on a human level and a cellular/systems level.

[Sonia Jarmula · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very inventive.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The idea behind the collection was more compelling than most of the poems. I imagine I'll be thinking about the themes for a while, even if not the poems themselves.

[Jeimy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a weird collection, but it was a unique one. It is poetry based on a hypochondriac's lab results. The musings are inspired by enzymes, metals, bacterial colonies, etc. I can't say I loved reading it, but I can say I don't regret it.

[Margaryta · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really believe that science and poetry are a wonderful and underappreciated combination, the latter capable of finding new ways of describing the former and making it accessible. I didn't think "Anatomic" was able to do that, despite how much thought and planning, as well as thought, personal reflection, and possibly even experience that Dickinson put into the collection. I found it almost impossible to find an entry point into these poems, and what I did manage to pick out felt like disjointed scraps that were part of a larger whole that I had no access to. I ended up thinking back to Madhur Anand's "A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes", which I thought was a much more successful collection in that regard, as it was able to do what Dickonson's "Anatomic" ultimately, for me, failed at, namely finding a balance between science and the "humanities", the technical and the emotional, or even making the technical seem relevant enough to care about.

[H. Dalloway · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved its oddity, and the new perspectives it gave me...

I think it's important to understand. Poetry does not exist in syntax here, in semantics, even if it is dressed that way. Nor does it exist in the scientific—what we are made of and how it works. For me, it arises in the merging.

When we understand the science and how it jump-starts poetry, hijacks its normal mode of expression. It is an intermedial form of poetry with its own being. It does, however, require that we understand; it requires effort and curiosity.

But if one takes on the task, one is often led to a new kind of understanding of how connected we are to one another, to everything around us. And it gives rise to a new kind of experience of existence, both wondrous and frightening— beyond the accepted surface to which we are stuck, like flies crushed against a windshield.

I mean: " For the first two years of my life, my mother's vaginal flora lived in my stomach. Consigned to the edge of their star system, they ate everything I ate (...) We are a lot alike, my mother and I. Her vagina made me cosmopolitan. (...) I watch my mother favour her disintegrating hips. The small party that left her for the new world founded a settlement on the moon she still tracks without looking."

come on!

[Kathy Mac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anatomically Correct

Short-listed for the 2019 Souster Award (for the best book published by a member of the League of Canadian Poets), Adam Dickinson’s "Anatomic" presents a tour-de-force approach to the cultured body; it pursues with thoroughness and rigour a novel approach to poetry. This book asks not just what we do to our environments, but what those environments do to us.

Dickinson had almost every possible personal effluvia he could express laboratory tested and analyzed. The results came back; they are "Anatomic." His analyses begin by exploring tensions between scientific method and creative revelation, but segue into a chemically-mediated memoir that deconstructs the corporeal/corporate binary, showing us that dust is “the street talk of the Endocrine and Alderaan systems” (104).

(taken from the Souster Award citation)

[Sanaa Hyder · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting and ambitious concept, but I had trouble with the execution.

Some poems felts like a random word generator had gone rogue. And for some that is probably the nature of poetry, but it just didn’t work for me. Some pieces in this collection were however informative: e.g. the traces of paraben and other toxic substances found in our bodies because of our environmental interactions; but the poems drawn as “inspiration” from these chemicals just left me confounded, in a not so good way.

I almost dnf-ed this book but pushed through for the sake of Netgalley, where I got a copy from the publishers to review.

Poetry usually moves me, this unfortunately did not.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.

This is a truly spectacular, remarkable book, which makes such magic with language that it crawls inside you and refuses to come out. It hit me with such familiarity and intimacy that, frankly, I'm still reeling –– this is the story of what makes a body, not in terms of the flesh-as-object but in terms of affective loads we bear.

[Stew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love poetry and I live in the medical world so I assumed this would be right up my alley. I think the concept is interesting, but in the end, it just fell flat for me. I applaud the effort and unique idea but I ended up not finishing it because I lost interest quite quickly.

[Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The lights stay on all night and no one sleeps. The stairs are swept. Thymine to Thymine. Uracil to Uracil. The sun doesn't oblige us to do anything, only something. All the stems await their cells."

[Lydia Cappetta · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the concept of this book extremely intriguing. The author undergoes extensive medical testing, in-depth analysis of all his bodily fluids, and then composes poems about the chemicals revealed in his blood, and ascertains why these chemicals are present in his body

[Sarah Giragosian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Required reading for the Anthropocene.

[Domenico Capilongo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another book of poetry by Adam Dickinson that transcends language and leaves you breathless. Amazing.

[Luke Spooner · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had high hopes, but it just didn't end up sparkling for me. Cool premise though.

[Drew Boulton]

Read for uni. OCD and The Sun Can Kill You were standouts for me.

[Esma · Rating 2 out of 5]

inventive and unreadable

[Alex Williams · Rating 2 out of 5]

My low rating is partly due to my distaste for mad libs style poetry books. I picked this up because I am studying microbiology and love poetry about science and was especially excited to read poetry based on an artist's experience of mapping their own micro-biome. There was not a lot of that in here, apart from mentions if stool samples, I think any reference to his micro-biome was limited to to the two lines on the back of the book and to some very cryptic abstract writing. I might have enjoyed this more if it wasn't so angry. I'd prefer less angst and more microbes please.

[jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘I am a city whose roads are merely widened trails cut by creatures looking for salt’ (121).

[Emily Coppella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent!

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a rad example of research poetics, OCD poetics, and political poetics all together in one icky syntactical soup.

[Melia Tessel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of poetry. The research is fantastic. Read it in my poetry class and it was fun to study as well.

[Lily Warken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worked on this for my thesis. But interesting!

[Matthew White Ellis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anatomic is a collection of poems that investigates the biological impact of the environment. An interesting inversion of ecopoetry conventions, Adam Dickinson turns the microscope inwards to examine how the environment impacts the body by analyzing the plastics, metals, and pesticides that invade us. Dickinson makes the case that a marriage of science and poetry can reveal an insightful look at how corporations effect our lives on the cellular level. The author is concerned not with how we write the environment, but how these foreign, unnatural partials write human biology.

I enjoyed this collection for its creativity and Dickinson’s polemical investigation of industrial impact on our bodies. I felt that Dickinson was able to blend the personal and the political in the collection with ease, albeit I can understand why this book may not be accessible for everyone. Without possessing much knowledge in the sciences myself, I still feel that this collection has a lot to offer in terms of poetics, meta narratives, and understanding the human through scientific investigation. When you consider the current underfunding of scientists (especially science that poses a threat to petro-industries), Dickinson’s work exemplifies the importance of scientific analysis to understand how capitalism encroaches on all of our lives, not just culturally and economically but biologically. The book is a brave statement and a wake up call to start taking a closer look at the impact of pesticide use, plastics, and industrial runoff.

I also enjoyed Dickinson’s word play in many of these poems, such as on page 78. On it’s own, this list of words wouldn’t be any stroke of genius, but within the context of this collection this list poem of homonyms fit thematically. For instance: “medal / meddle / metal / mettle”.
The solid uncomplicated object of a medal is disturbed by (or “meddled” with) the “metal” components of the object which invade the body. The collection is a reflection on the author’s “mettle” , as he reacts to the invasion of these metals.

The reading experience of Anatomic is fun and insightful and worth a second or third reading as there are many entry points to this collection. There’s the bare science which works quite explicitly on the page. There’s also what seems to be the author’s personal anecdotes in the prose poems and a thoughtful reflection of the act of writing and the role of the writer runs throughout the collection.