Sign Climacteric
When asked, I proposed a wet chapbook on “the climacteric” as a Hostile Book.
Climacteric: a crucial event, a tipping point in earth’s history and in a woman’s body, in botany regarded as “ripening on the vine,” and in western medicine, who regards the woman as useful only if procreating, synonymous with “decline.” There is a narrowed vasomotor tolerance range leading to an over-response to heat; there is sweat and its accompanying social revulsion; there is thin sleep, exhaustion, and the desire for retreat.
A Hostile Book: a paper book sealed in a zip-lock bag called GLAD with at least one tablespoon of water. A sweaty book. The reader chooses to open, to touch the wet pages, to try and read it, or to leave it sealed up to possibly break down and transform—both choices being ways to read/touch the planet and the body of a woman not young but knowing, on her way to death but not ending.
This long poem is part of a longer work featuring a middle-aged woman walking through an imaginary city that is not quite the Middle East and not quite the US Midwest. Situated in many middles, she feels anything but average and dull. She feels the heat of insights acutely as she investigates cellular respiration, citizenship and so-called free speech, the feminized labor of teaching, and the menopause instruction to “give birth to yourself.” As a poet and artist this last bit of advice is useless; she’s only ever birthed herself. Menopausal whales, good at distributing resources, make an appearance.
This Hostile Book may be a punk text—but it is not the singular voice of a rebel in her twenties breaking away from family, acquiring addictions, wearing fish-nets with cut-off shorts and so on. This life-stage language is pacing itself, just as this subject must: warding off exhaustion and bullshit she can’t control so as to be receptive to self while optimally networked with others.
—Jill Magi
Cover design by Veronica Wong
