Case Notes

by David Stavanger

The follow up to the award-winning collection The Special, this electric new body of work by David Stavanger is a mix tape of free verse, lyric poetry, found text, spoken word and flash fiction documenting the lived/living mental health experience and the well beyond.

'If you haven’t laughed or cried or seen rain in a while, Stavanger's collection is the breaking of the dry spell – the sore, urgent state of bursting forth, face lifted to the beauty and the horror of the world. The human and other animal bodies on these pages are expressed as grimly humorous, heartbreaking, stunningly experiential narratives. This is poetry at its very best.' Laura Jean McKay

'The poems in Case Notes are intimate and playful, elegiac and bursting with love. They walk us home with our dogs in every kind of weather, name all our missing things and claim them back. The world felt familiar and unknown to me after reading these poems.' Tishani Doshi

‘This book is beautiful and sardonic and tender. Stavanger’s poetry traces the fractures of sanity and feeling, and makes meaning and hope in the hollows left by lost memories and lost people.' Jonathan Dunk

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2020

Reviews

[Gemma Mahadeo · Rating 5 out of 5]

full disclosure: I want to judge this collection as if I didn’t know the author, but it’s hard.

So many of the sentiments in this collection will stay with me for a really long time: the poet has a way of saying everyday things we feel (both folks with history of mental
illness and its institutions, and those who don’t) in such an elegant way, only to break your heart in the following lines detailing what people go through in the public psychiatric system. It’s a chronicle of being diagnosed as ‘broken’, and being defined by society as such, but still somehow hopeful in voicing profound appreciation for those tiny, sometimes hidden joys in life one might not otherwise see.

[Sonia Nair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Case Notes is a lyrical, strangely haunting and unnerving meditation on mental illness, neoliberal capitalism, addiction, intergenerational trauma, masculinity. It's darkly funny – “I am considered ‘an excellent candidate for ECT’. I am thrilled. My arts degree has come to something after all.” – and the mediation of self through the prism of technology reminds me of Elizabeth Tan's Smart Ovens for Lonely People in the best possible way.

[Jenny Esots · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cheeky reflective laughing and crying poems.

In Electric Journal - which is a series of nights and days:

'I am considered an excellent candidate for ECT'. I am thrilled.
My arts degree has come to something after all.'

'Remission rates are encouraging,
I sit in the waiting room with my name on my wrist
in case I forget what wrists are for.'

[Heather Taylor-Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is ridiculously energetic thanks to clever stylistic experimentation and a zesty tone. Much of it is devoted to examining mental health, if not all of it, so I suppose one could call it a themed book, but there's so much variation that each poem feels new, each idea original. BOLD book!

[Joshua Donellan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A haunting, human and beautiful collection.

[sparrow · Rating 2 out of 5]

this one didnt hit me to the same extend that "the special" did, but the poems that did really did.

-shell
-octonaut
-(1)