A challenging exploration of mental illness and disability from Governor General’s Award winner Jacob Scheier.
Is This Scary? digs deep into internal landscapes of suffering, including depression and anxiety, chronic physical ailment, and rare neurological malady. With its many eccentric songs and odes to medications and medical procedures, this book is full of both levity and unapologetic lament. Pushing back against societal stigma, Is This Scary? unflinchingly addresses experiences of psychiatric institutionalization and suicidality, without either romanticizing or pathologizing them. Scheier rejects much of the mainstream cultural views of mental illness, subverting the biochemical model by emphasizing the radical subjectivity of mental suffering. While the poems render the difficulty of communicating pain to others, they defiantly celebrate its expression and evocation through visceral lyricism.
Scheier also challenges our culture’s desire to be inspired by stories of “triumphing” over illness and disability. Nothing is overcome here, the journey from illness to wellness is one of narrative and aesthetic disruption. The perpetually incomplete search for self and home is ultimately at the heart of this book: along with being a person with disabilities, the poet-speaker identifies as a Diaspora-Jew, engaging exile as a chronic state of being that isn’t intended to be resolved, but rather explored, expressed, and honored.
⤖ My Review ⬻
Before diving into my review fir Is This Scary? I would like to start out by saying that I don’t read a lot of poetry. A majority of it kind of goes over my head, despite my love for the English language and my two university degrees in English Literature, haha. I can appreciate the way in which language is used, but the meaning behind a certain poem usually has to be quite obvious in order for me to understand it.
Despite this, something about Is This Scary? urged me to read it. I will admit that the cover definitely caught my eye and made me look into what the book was about. And when I found out that this is a collection of poetry focused on chronic pain and pain of the mental variety (e.g. anxiety and depression), I was even more intrigued. I wanted to see how Scheier addressed these things and the words he used to do this.
Once I read Is This Scary? however, I found that while there were certain passages that spoke to me, most of what the poet tried to do with this collection of poems was lost on me. I may have to stick to reading and reviewing fiction and nonfiction from now on.