Jason Purcell

Jason Purcell is a writer and musician from amiskwaciwaskahikan, Treaty 6 (Edmonton), where they are also the co-owner of Glass Bookshop. As a chronically ill writer, Purcell writes at the intersection of queerness and illness and is the author of the chapbook A Place More Hospitable (Anstruther Press). Swollening is their first full-length collection.

Website: jasonpurcell.ca
Twitter: @jasonvpurcell
Instagram: @jasonvpurcell

They write like a painter, with measurement and palette exactitude, but also as contained abandonment. They teach us that ‘neither of us (can) move beyond the syllable’. This is a poet to watch, and we must all dare to witness.“ –Joshua Whitehead

FESTIVAL BOOK

Swollening

An intimate and vulnerable debut poetry collection that examines the queer, sick body as a reaction to an ill world and asks how to move on toward hope.

Jason Purcell’s debut collection of poems rests at the intersection of queerness and illness, staking a place for the queer body that has been made sick through living in this world. Part poetic experiment and part memoir, Swollening attempts to diagnose what has been undiagnosable, tracing an uneven path from a lifetime of swallowing bad feelings – homophobia in its external and internalized manifestations, heteronormativity, anxiety surrounding desire, aversion to sex – to a body in revolt.

In poems that speak using the grammar and logics of sickness, Purcell offers a dizzying collision of word and image that is the language of pain alongside the banality of living on. Beginning by reading their own life and body closely and slowly zooming out to read illness in the world, Purcell comes to ask: how might a sick, queer body forgive itself for a natural reaction to living in a sick world and go on toward hope? In Swollening, Purcell coughs up their own poetics of illness, their own aesthetics of pain, to form a tender collection that lands straight in the gut.