“The Pathologies of Flesh: Temporalities of Feminine Embodiment in Contemporary Poetry” examines contemporary American poetry which considers the relationship between illness and time. The experience of illness instigates a breakdown of linear chronology, and the poets I analyze use these ruptures as a means to depict the ambiguities of illness. I draw from recent scholarship on time and the body in queer studies and disability studies in order to explore the various “times” of illness: the moments of duration, onset, prognosis, and treatment that subvert the temporal narratives of the “healthy” body. “The Pathologies of Flesh” argues that illness functions in the “gaps” of time, rather than unfolding linearly; poetry thus functions as a form of disruption, offering the writer a space of respite from these breaks in time. In acknowledging these temporal breaks, poetry opens up the possibility of approaching other alternative experiences of time—as the chapters explore—from the slow violence of environmental disaster to the accelerated crisis of police brutality.

The project examines poetry from the early twentieth century through the present, including canonical figures such as Muriel Rukeyser, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich. The heart of the project reads the work of a group of women writing at the close of the twentieth century and into the next: Elizabeth Arnold, Claudia Rankine, Bhanu Kapil, Danielle Pafunda, Jillian Weise, and Anne Boyer, and the late poets Hillary Gravendyk and C.D. Wright. “The Pathologies of Flesh” argues that the temporal ruptures experienced within illness relate to other kinds of rupture, such as social marginalization, spatial movement, and the aggressive, abrupt ruptures of violent action. In considering a wide variety of illnesses—including cancers, chronic illnesses, and mental illnesses—the chapters draw connections between the disruptions found in geological spaces, in labor and compensation, in racial conflict, and in the documentation of death. Poetry thus makes a compelling intervention in teleological narrative structures, offering a space—linguistically and on the page itself—to examine ruptures in time and their effect on the body.