What do you think?
Rate this book
Cataloguing Pain
Cataloguing Pain by Allison Blevins explores motherhood, sexuality, and queerness as it juxtaposes the author’s diagnosis of MS with her partner’s gender transition. As one body moves toward unfamiliarity, a state of chronic pain, a sense of being caged, the other is escaping pain, emerging into its true self, becoming free. Cataloguing Pain chronicles both trauma and hope through marriage, illness, and motherhood as the author learns how to live in a disabled body.
Allison Blevins writes, in Cataloguing Pain, “Do you think of me as a swallowtail, a fern, a dust covered suit coat?” These questions scaffold the collection, which acts as a lyric guide for any body that finds itself awash with change. These poems ground, stun, and transport their readers into the intimacies of the bedroom, the washroom, a closet draped in metaphor. What a gift to be pulled this closely, to be invited in like this.
—Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Water I Won't Touch
Allison Blevins plumbs the alive moments of desire and memory, breathtakingly insistent on color and depth and flesh as she asserts and interrogates her continued existence in the face of change, pain, grief, and becoming.
—Sonya Huber, Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day
Cataloguing Pain by Allison Blevins crips what the catalog does as a rhetorical device, meticulously capturing the intimacies of care work, which are sometimes painful, sometimes joyful in their demands of both caregiver and recipient. But, as Blevins suggests, these roles are hardly distinct; rather, they fold into one another unexpectedly as pain challenges precedent and expectation. Care and pain are revealed to always be relational and intertwined—a series of negotiations for which no one is fully prepared. This book is tender precisely because it sits with the failures of these negotiations and with the moments when care can be its own form of both hurt and balm.
—Travis Chi Wing Lau, Paring
In Cataloguing Pain, Allison Blevins is both insightful observer and attuned inhabiter of the body “always partially new and yet…still always dying..” In this stunning collection, everyone is leaving behind the bodies they knew in the midst of unfamiliar becomings. The vibrant poems and lyric paragraphs of Cataloguing Pain attend to pain and paralysis, shame and uncertainty, cage and transformation, and the many confounding truths and fables of an embodied life, a familial life. As language’s caregiver, Blevins wraps old pain, new pain, and immeasurable pain into words that we bear together. Cataloguing Pain is a visceral, contemplative collection that leaves both my skin and my mind buzzing.
—Anna Leahy, What Happened Was:
Allison Blevins writes, in Cataloguing Pain, “Do you think of me as a swallowtail, a fern, a dust covered suit coat?” These questions scaffold the collection, which acts as a lyric guide for any body that finds itself awash with change. These poems ground, stun, and transport their readers into the intimacies of the bedroom, the washroom, a closet draped in metaphor. What a gift to be pulled this closely, to be invited in like this.
—Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Water I Won't Touch
Allison Blevins plumbs the alive moments of desire and memory, breathtakingly insistent on color and depth and flesh as she asserts and interrogates her continued existence in the face of change, pain, grief, and becoming.
—Sonya Huber, Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day
Cataloguing Pain by Allison Blevins crips what the catalog does as a rhetorical device, meticulously capturing the intimacies of care work, which are sometimes painful, sometimes joyful in their demands of both caregiver and recipient. But, as Blevins suggests, these roles are hardly distinct; rather, they fold into one another unexpectedly as pain challenges precedent and expectation. Care and pain are revealed to always be relational and intertwined—a series of negotiations for which no one is fully prepared. This book is tender precisely because it sits with the failures of these negotiations and with the moments when care can be its own form of both hurt and balm.
—Travis Chi Wing Lau, Paring
In Cataloguing Pain, Allison Blevins is both insightful observer and attuned inhabiter of the body “always partially new and yet…still always dying..” In this stunning collection, everyone is leaving behind the bodies they knew in the midst of unfamiliar becomings. The vibrant poems and lyric paragraphs of Cataloguing Pain attend to pain and paralysis, shame and uncertainty, cage and transformation, and the many confounding truths and fables of an embodied life, a familial life. As language’s caregiver, Blevins wraps old pain, new pain, and immeasurable pain into words that we bear together. Cataloguing Pain is a visceral, contemplative collection that leaves both my skin and my mind buzzing.
—Anna Leahy, What Happened Was:
- GenresPoetryHealthDisability
100 pages, Paperback
Published April 19, 2023
2 people are currently reading
76 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
May 17, 2023
Last year I reviewed Allison Blevins’ Handbook for the Newly Disabled. This shares its autobiographical consideration of chronic illness and queer parenting. Specifically, she looks back to her MS diagnosis and three IVF pregnancies, and her spouse’s transition. Both partners were undergoing bodily transformations and coming into new identities, the one as disabled and the other as a man. In later poems she calls herself “The shell”, while “Elegy for My Wife,” which closes Part I, makes way for references to “my husband” in Part II.
In unrhymed couplets or stanzas and bittersweet paragraphs, Blevins marshals metaphors from domestic life – colours, food, furniture, gardening – to chart the changes that pain and disability force onto their family’s everyday routines. “Fall Risk” and “Fly Season” are particular highlights. This is a potent and frankly sexual text for readers drawn to themes of health and queer family-making.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
“I won’t wail for your dead name. I don’t mean that violence. I wish for a word other than elegy to explain how some of this feels like goodbye.”
In unrhymed couplets or stanzas and bittersweet paragraphs, Blevins marshals metaphors from domestic life – colours, food, furniture, gardening – to chart the changes that pain and disability force onto their family’s everyday routines. “Fall Risk” and “Fly Season” are particular highlights. This is a potent and frankly sexual text for readers drawn to themes of health and queer family-making.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
May 7, 2023
Haunting, questioning, shimmering poems considering chronic illness, pain, and the body’s betrayals. These poems are heavy without feeling hopeless. As haunted as their speaker is by bodygrief, these poems are also lit from within by the experiences of long love, marriage, and motherhood.
May 1, 2023
One of the best poetry collections of 2023, and the most powerful poetry collection I have ever read on living with chronic pain. Highly recommend this book!
January 19, 2026
Allison Blevins' Cataloguing Pain reads like a worship of pain, which is a nod to the poet's ability to morph agony into pleasure by shaping and re-shaping language—how, in a poem in which the speaker recalls that first "small burning" of desire between her thighs when she was a child thinking "just right about that girl on TV," the only solution "was to rub the pain away." (from "Pain as Caged Birds")
In the same way, Blevins defines and re-defines pain, as she knows it—how eventually the physical pain felt in a disabled body fades against the anguish of remembering what the body once did and is no longer capable of:
"The pain scale is no longer body or nerves: my locking hips, my tightening calf. Pain is memory. Pain is how my children used to run their bodies full speed into my body, the shush of an elliptical machine, that night we fucked on the living room floor of our first house." (from "Diagnosis")
While pain presses on the body, demanding to be felt, in the first half of the collection, it finds a way to settle in the second half. The pain is still there, but in a coexistence with the body, even finding ways to bring gratitude and moments of joy into the speaker's life. In one section of "Pain as Caged Birds,'' Blevins turns physical therapy on an underwater treadmill into a cinematic love story:
"We could almost be mistaken for lovers nearly in love if a camera would swirl around us. We stand face-to-face, hold hands gently over the water. The audience dizzies from the spinning. I imagine some film school professor once associated vertigo with love and now here we are."
Again, that collision of pleasure and pain. How they can be felt simultaneously, how one can breed the other, how one cannot be felt without the other, "how skin softly hardens at the heels and elbows, the first crunch of cinnamoned sugar on toast in the mouth, jumping bones that bend and run on landing . . ." (from "3 am on the toilet, the shell forgets")
I feel like this idea comes to a poignant peak in "Running as Self-Portrait," where running becomes a metaphor for living in a body with chronic pain: "I'm the running [. . .] We who worship at the feet of pain have been cured of before and after."
"Cataloguing Pain as Non-Narcotic Pain Reliever" feels like the poem where the pain settles, drifts to the background, overridden by joys so great, they're akin to pain:
"Each of my children fed from my breasts, wrapped their tight hands tight around my index finger as they tippled and dozed on my belly. This is the tight I feel. Not the electric pain of information pulsing over batter nerves, pain that bands my legs and chest—the memory of my children squeezes me."
The memory of her children doesn't hurt or soothe; it squeezes—an ambiguity that could fall in either direction.
What I love about this collection is that it does not call the reader to understand the speaker's pain. Similarly, it does not preach gratitude through pain or offer a guide toward relief for those experiencing chronic pain. It merely asks the reader to bear witness:
"Someone must witness the chrysalis, the knife, how it burns to expand and dry and shake in the shell." (from "Cataloguing Pain as Non-Narcotic Pain Reliever")
In the same way, Blevins defines and re-defines pain, as she knows it—how eventually the physical pain felt in a disabled body fades against the anguish of remembering what the body once did and is no longer capable of:
"The pain scale is no longer body or nerves: my locking hips, my tightening calf. Pain is memory. Pain is how my children used to run their bodies full speed into my body, the shush of an elliptical machine, that night we fucked on the living room floor of our first house." (from "Diagnosis")
While pain presses on the body, demanding to be felt, in the first half of the collection, it finds a way to settle in the second half. The pain is still there, but in a coexistence with the body, even finding ways to bring gratitude and moments of joy into the speaker's life. In one section of "Pain as Caged Birds,'' Blevins turns physical therapy on an underwater treadmill into a cinematic love story:
"We could almost be mistaken for lovers nearly in love if a camera would swirl around us. We stand face-to-face, hold hands gently over the water. The audience dizzies from the spinning. I imagine some film school professor once associated vertigo with love and now here we are."
Again, that collision of pleasure and pain. How they can be felt simultaneously, how one can breed the other, how one cannot be felt without the other, "how skin softly hardens at the heels and elbows, the first crunch of cinnamoned sugar on toast in the mouth, jumping bones that bend and run on landing . . ." (from "3 am on the toilet, the shell forgets")
I feel like this idea comes to a poignant peak in "Running as Self-Portrait," where running becomes a metaphor for living in a body with chronic pain: "I'm the running [. . .] We who worship at the feet of pain have been cured of before and after."
"Cataloguing Pain as Non-Narcotic Pain Reliever" feels like the poem where the pain settles, drifts to the background, overridden by joys so great, they're akin to pain:
"Each of my children fed from my breasts, wrapped their tight hands tight around my index finger as they tippled and dozed on my belly. This is the tight I feel. Not the electric pain of information pulsing over batter nerves, pain that bands my legs and chest—the memory of my children squeezes me."
The memory of her children doesn't hurt or soothe; it squeezes—an ambiguity that could fall in either direction.
What I love about this collection is that it does not call the reader to understand the speaker's pain. Similarly, it does not preach gratitude through pain or offer a guide toward relief for those experiencing chronic pain. It merely asks the reader to bear witness:
"Someone must witness the chrysalis, the knife, how it burns to expand and dry and shake in the shell." (from "Cataloguing Pain as Non-Narcotic Pain Reliever")
November 23, 2025
Cataloguing Pain is one of the most honest and breathtaking explorations of the body I’ve ever encountered. Allison Blevins writes with a clarity that cuts straight to the nerve, her words inhabit pain without romanticizing it, yet also reveal the astonishing tenderness that can exist alongside suffering. The juxtaposition of her MS diagnosis with her partner’s gender transition is handled with such grace, honesty, and complexity that I found myself pausing repeatedly just to breathe in the magnitude of what she captures.
This book does not simply describe pain; it transforms it, wraps it in language so vivid and intimate that you feel it, hold it, and understand it in a new way. It is a stunning testament to love, identity, resilience, and the shifting landscapes of the human body. This collection left me changed.
November 23, 2025
Reading Cataloguing Pain feels like being invited into a deeply personal, sacred space. Allison Blevins writes with a soft precision that carries enormous emotional weight. Her reflections on illness, marriage, queerness, and motherhood reveal the countless ways a body can shift, falter, and continue.
Each piece is attentive, unwavering, and courageous. This book doesn’t offer easy answers . instead, it offers truth, presence, and the kind of language that helps you see your own life differently. Her partner’s transition, set against her own loss of bodily autonomy, creates a narrative contrast that is profoundly moving and beautifully rendered.
I left this book feeling both shaken and comforted. It is a gift.
November 23, 2025
Allison Blevins has created something extraordinary in Cataloguing Pain. Every poem, every paragraph pulses with life , raw, tender, fearless. Her ability to write the body as both cage and possibility is nothing short of remarkable.
The tension between her chronic illness and her partner’s liberation through transition is told with remarkable compassion and depth. Blevins doesn’t shy away from uncertainty, fear, or grief , and yet, hope glimmers on every page. Her language is precise and haunting, carrying images that linger long after the book is closed.
This is a brilliant and necessary collection, a guide for anyone navigating transformation, disability, love, or the fragile miracle of being alive.
November 23, 2025
Cataloguing Pain is a masterpiece of embodied truth. Blevins writes with a rare courage that invites readers to witness both the breaking and the becoming. The way she renders chronic pain , not only as a physical reality but as an emotional, relational, and spiritual force , is so vivid and so human that I felt every pulse of it.
Yet what struck me most is the tenderness woven through the trauma. The juxtaposition of her MS journey with her partner’s gender transition is handled with profound empathy. This is a collection not just about pain, but about change, identity, and the fierce, complicated love that holds a family together.
It is visceral, unsettling, beautiful , and unforgettable.
February 23, 2024
A collection of prose poems about the poet's MS diagnosis, pain, betrayal of the body, and her spouse's transition.
from The Name in the Doorway: "A blue and humming three-winged bird, my name waits and waits, lands softly on my mouth to wake my body from sleep, soft as the start of a pistol, soft as a lurching coaster, soft as a table leg in the dark."
from Running as Self-Portrait: "I'm the running, not the before or after. We believers, we followers, we kneelers at the temple of neurons traveling. We who worship at the feet of pain have been cure of before and after."
from The Name in the Doorway: "A blue and humming three-winged bird, my name waits and waits, lands softly on my mouth to wake my body from sleep, soft as the start of a pistol, soft as a lurching coaster, soft as a table leg in the dark."
from Running as Self-Portrait: "I'm the running, not the before or after. We believers, we followers, we kneelers at the temple of neurons traveling. We who worship at the feet of pain have been cure of before and after."
August 6, 2025
Sealey Challenge Day 6! This collection follows the author being diagnosed with MS and how chronic pain impacts every corner of her life, from parenting to relationships to memory and movement itself. It also explores the nuances in her feelings about her husband's transition, contrasting this healing/blossoming with her own illness. I enjoyed Blevins' use of prose poems in short blocks, and the tone throughout was so tender and studied. Really beautiful language and the layout of the book is fabulous, I felt like it told such a cohesive story.
November 23, 2025
Cataloguing Pain is a triumph of voice, vulnerability, and artistry. Blevins moves through subjects that many writers would hesitate to approach, disability, transformation, sexuality, family and she handles each with a breathtaking blend of precision and compassion.
Her writing is a living, breathing thing. The poems vibrate with tension, grief, longing, and unexpected joy. The lyric paragraphs hold entire worlds in a few sentences. This book doesn’t simply tell a story , it embodies one.
June 20, 2023
I thoroughly enjoyed--if enjoyed is the right word for this collection--Blevins's artful and honest look at pain: emotional pain as well as physical. In this hybrid collection, Blevins doesn't turn away from an honest reporting of her experiences with MS as well as her spouse's transition from F to M. A gripping read. My favorite line will always be "But nothing can be learned from pain except what it is to feel pain." YES.
November 23, 2025
There are books that speak, and there are books that resonate. Cataloguing Pain does both.
Blevins writes with a fearless lyricism, weaving vulnerability and intellect into an unforgettable tapestry. Her sentences are so beautifully crafted they almost glow. This is a book that refuses to flatter the reader. instead, it asks them to witness, to feel, and ultimately, to understand. A masterpiece.
November 23, 2025
Blevins has created a text that feels both delicate as silk and sharp as broken glass. She takes disability, queerness, motherhood, and love and holds them up to the light with astonishing literary precision.
The dual journeys , her MS and her partner’s transition , unfold with such honesty that the reader feels invited into a private, sacred space. This book will leave echoes long after the final page.
November 23, 2025
Reading Cataloguing Pain feels like being brought close to a flame. The heat, the light, the risk , it’s all here. Blevins writes with an honesty that borders on holy.
The intersections of illness, sexuality, and identity are rendered with nuance and deep humanity. This book is not simply read; it is experienced in the body. I finished it with tears, gratitude, and awe.
August 7, 2024
I read this for Shorter is Better book club, and the author joined the meeting to share some backstory and her process! It’s a really touching, emotional book and I love the writing style, so I’m eager to read more by Blevins.
August 10, 2025
Cataloguing Pain by Allison Blevins (YesYes Books, 2023. Blevins takes readers into the intimate moments of a woman relearning the vulnerabilities and rhythms of her body — and life — changed by multiple sclerosis and its pain. A tender collection shaped by love, family, and strength.
November 23, 2025
The parallel journeys , her MS diagnosis and her partner’s gender transition , create a narrative architecture that is groundbreaking in its honesty.
This is not just a book to read; it is a book to feel, to carry, and to return to.
This is not just a book to read; it is a book to feel, to carry, and to return to.
May 29, 2023
One of the best poetry books I've read in years. Absolutely gutting, I starred every single poem. Prose poems have never sang like this. Just. SO IMPORTANT!!!!!
March 16, 2024
This collection of poems is honest. It is a view of pain in body and relationship and family and change. This collection of poems is courage.
March 15, 2025
Beautiful, honest, loving, moving, generous collection. So glad I read it; will re-read, particularly to get me through. With introductory quote from Sonya Huber, this hits with me.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews