Overview

Nicole Callihan's semantic debates and whimsical linguistics in This Strange Garment open the reader to more than the pain, treatment, and aftermath of breast cancer. We also get the ""god in the scars."" Hers is a mind of lyrical curiosity, turning life around and finding prisms. Let her show you how to ""place lady slipper orchids where your flesh used to be."" Let these poems pull you into a life ""severed but raptured."" 
 -Lauren Camp, 2022-2025 New Mexico Poet Laureate

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9781947896611

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Reviews

This Strange Garment is raw, real, honest, direct, and vulnerable. Callihan uses formal invention and wit to make poems that people need-poems of survival, of will and pain, of being aware, of acceptance, and choosing to be joyful in spite of conditions. It's a pleasure playing around in her mind. Her insistence on precision and the immediacy of experience is made real and pure through the electricity of her language. -Sean Singer, Today in the Taxi If I made a list of my fears, it would begin this way, writes Nicole Callihan in This Strange Garment-and indeed, this collection faces down a barrage of threats. The pandemic seeps under doors as cancer faces off with radiation; physical and emotional pain are ubiquitous. Enduring surgery and treatment for breast cancer while caring for children, the speaker explores mortality and attempts to understand what is happening to her. Nevertheless, her terror does not preclude moments of ravenous hope: I write the same word over and over, and mostly that word is light. While she reflects on reconstructive surgeries, Callihan says, If you say belly button over and over, it'll start to sound like something else. Like saying hydrangea until it becomes a bomb. Callihan's poetry captures that very power of defamiliarization, creating poetic space where flower meets explosion and light meets cancer. I am not the same woman who began this story, she writes, and I am not the same woman after reading This Strange Garment. -Jessica L. Walsh, Book of Gods and Grudges

Do you ever feel like an alien? Callihan (Superloop) asks in her intimate and bracing latest. I am feeling more and more like my childhood alien abduction dreams were actually dreams about middle-aged cancer treatment, she writes. Throughout this collection, which chronicles the speaker's breast cancer diagnosis and resulting treatment during the pandemic, Callihan skillfully weaves narrative and lyric, humor and pathos, fragments and philosophical musings. In one poem, she wonders, What comes after/ the after? While many entries take the form of prose blocks or lyric essays, Callihan also invents forms, like the associative sequence The Paper Anniversary, each section of which opens identically, then diverges according to sound: Paper gowns are not as soft.../ as water/ as the eyelashes of my daughter. The speaker's husband, children, mother, friends, cab drivers, doctors, and various medical personnel populate these pages, ultimately revealing that the speaker is surrounded by love. Meanwhile, instead of the usual medical pain scale, Callihan defiantly proposes a pleasure scale, and not moderate pleasure, I want/ severe. Severed but raptured. Not comfort but pleasure./ Pure unadulterated pleasure. Ten, I want to say, ten. This beautiful, memorable book makes room for the complete range. -Publishers Weekly (February 2023) This Strange Garment is raw, real, honest, direct, and vulnerable. Callihan uses formal invention and wit to make poems that people need-poems of survival, of will and pain, of being aware, of acceptance, and choosing to be joyful in spite of conditions. It's a pleasure playing around in her mind. Her insistence on precision and the immediacy of experience is made real and pure through the electricity of her language. -Sean Singer, Today in the Taxi If I made a list of my fears, it would begin this way, writes Nicole Callihan in This Strange Garment-and indeed, this collection faces down a barrage of threats. The pandemic seeps under doors as cancer faces off with radiation; physical and emotional pain are ubiquitous. Enduring surgery and treatment for breast cancer while caring for children, the speaker explores mortality and attempts to understand what is happening to her. Nevertheless, her terror does not preclude moments of ravenous hope: I write the same word over and over, and mostly that word is light. While she reflects on reconstructive surgeries, Callihan says, If you say belly button over and over, it'll start to sound like something else. Like saying hydrangea until it becomes a bomb. Callihan's poetry captures that very power of defamiliarization, creating poetic space where flower meets explosion and light meets cancer. I am not the same woman who began this story, she writes, and I am not the same woman after reading This Strange Garment. -Jessica L. Walsh, Book of Gods and Grudges

Author Information

Nicole Callihan's poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tin House, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review, and as a Poem-a-Day feature from the Academy of American Poets. Her books include SuperLoop, a collection of poems published in 2014. In 2015, she received, with Zoë Ryder White, the Baltic Writing Residency Chapbook Contest Award for their chapbook A Study in Spring (Rabbit Catastrophe Press, 2015). She is also the author of The Deeply Flawed Human, Downtown, Aging, and Translucence, a dual-language, cross-culture collaboration with Palestinian poet Samar Abdel Jaber. She taught in New York University's Expository Writing for twenty years and now hosts both informal and formal online poetry gatherings. She lives in New York City.

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