Cataloguing Pain

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, author of Water I Won't Touch

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, author of What Happened Was:

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. Care and pain are revealed to always be relational and intertwined-a series of negotiations for which no one is fully prepared.

-Travis Chi Wing Lau, author of Paring

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, author of Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day