Side Effects May Include Strangers

Reviews / Votes

"Dominik Parisien's Side Effects May Include Strangers shines light onto and into the lives of medicalized, queered, and disabled bodies. In their venous fireworks, these poems are astonishing flares that illuminate a seized body 'bursting with strangers,' or diagnostic tools that operate 'the way a blade' makes 'a body easy to interpret.' These are provocative, linguistically dexterous poems that invite you to reimagine the shape and possibilities of living with illness and pleasure." Adam Dickinson, author of Anatomic

"If 'words are artificial / constructs we impose / on natural phenomena,' then communicating the elemental human experience of love and pain requires a new lexicon. Fortunately, Dominik Parisien gifts us a new vocabulary for the inexpressible in this luminous collection of poems. The impossibility of language as a mirror for pain is explored in gorgeously lucid terms. Parisien carves intimate portraits of daily life; the rich spectrum of disability in its radiant texture is detailed with exquisitely clear precision. By poetic alchemy, hurt is transmuted from medicalized language to mythical expression. A rethinking, reframing, recontextualizing, and radical reimagining of the trial by fire that is chronic pain, Side Effects May Include Strangers answers the question: 'Can we for a moment make of beauty / the measure of our pain?' Grounded in authenticity, crafted with careful grace and attention, these poems enable the heart to sing." Roxanna Bennett, author of Unmeaningable

"I have to admit I was not prepared for how exquisite the first poem is in [...] Side Effects May Include Strangers. It is the kind of poem that, for a poet when you read it, it gives you an immediate sense of satisfaction, and also tendrils of envy which for me marks the quality of an excellent poem. It is the kind of poem that for a young poet with a first book says I have arrived." The Miramichi Reader

"Parisien's poems are paeans of fiercely tender queer love that write with -- not through -- disability, depression, and illness, without false narratives of progress. Side Effects May Include Strangers is a necessary and life-affirming book of poems." Hamilton Review of Books

"Parisien's poems never move away from pain and suffering, but the beauty of the book lies in its most important thesis, which is to prove that pain is not an affront to beauty. Parisien's rebellion towards the representation and perception of physical and mental ailment is framed perhaps in heart-wrenchingly beautiful and gentle poetics that stands in the face of expectation." Arc