Toxemia, Christine McNair
Bookhug, 2024
If you’ve ever dealt with depression, you’ll find yourself nodding your head in agreement with the ways in which she describes that void. In “clever clogs,” McNair writes of how she managed the illusion of good health while working at a small press, creating a mirage for bosses and co-workers, but exhausted by that output of energy at the end of each day. That wears a person down over time. She captures it beautifully when she writes: “And anyways, hide it. Just hide it. Don’t tell. You know what happens when you tell.” Then, when it begins to collapse: “I fail. I fail. I fail. I consider pinning a note to the door and walking away. Just to save everyone the disappointment and allow quicker HR turnover.” She continues, writing, “It’s the loneliness. It’s the depression not quite corralled. It’s the interior aspect of intense…that falls into sharp planes. And I know it’s unreasonable. So, I control, I contain, I stay within the lines.//Until I can’t.” Those who have been there will nod their heads in agreement. They’ll recognize the place where it all crashes down.
The underlying current of depression in a person’s life is a theme that threads itself through Toxemia. McNair makes the reader think about how they might deal with insomnia, depression, anxiety, and then also think about layering in the added stress of physical health issues. Survivors of depression will recognize this dance, of trying not to catastrophize when dealing with chronic, physical health issues that are beyond your control. Too, weave in how women perceive and view their physical bodies—throughout the course of their lives—and you’ve got a problematic mix of physical and mental challenges. McNair considers the complexity of all these moving parts in Toxemia, which is why it’s a brilliant, complex, and thought-provoking book.
In the section titled “treatment,” there’s a poem titled “look,” where McNair writes about how depression is like a caul, and how “depression in the ancient world was cured with/bloodletting, baths, exercise, diet” and how treatment has supposedly changed since then, as “that membranous caul [is] still caught in eyelids.” In “loop,” the speaker says: “Mindfulness is vital. Mindfulness is crucial. I breathe through. I rage on the top of breath and on the under of breath. It latchkeys me to the moment that keeps me sane but it is also suffocating.” A diagnosis of depression often means that you need to learn to ‘manage it’ over the course of your lifetime, through medicine and therapy, along with mindfulness, while still consciously searching out and documenting the bright spots as you go through day-to-day routines.
The title of the collection, Toxemia, refers to an older medical term for today’s diagnosis of preeclampsia. It also made me, as a reader, think of how there are so many toxic elements to human lives, but particularly when you consider women’s health. When things fall apart with our physical health—and I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately—how do we manage, survive, and still flourish as we face chronic illness and disability? How do we face our own ableism in the face of a new disability, and how does that change the way in which we view (and live in) the world? How do we mind our mental health as our physical health becomes uncertain and increasingly problematic as we age? How do we tend to (and care for) our human selves when we’re caught up inside a frustratingly inhuman and often sexist and patriarchal medical system? So many questions, I know, and a lot of them unanswered, or answered dependent upon each person’s own experiences. Beyond all of this, what Toxemia did for me is that it made me reconsider how we—as women—define and redefine ourselves throughout the course of our lives.
McNair’s attention to craft and structure is evident throughout the collection, but one example of her keen and adept writerly ability comes in the sequence of nine poems titled “nesting dolls.” Images of the Russian matryoshka are conjured inside the reader’s mind, so that the fitting together of memory pieces makes perfect sense to a person’s search for identity and desire to document evolution over time. In this grouping of poems, McNair etches out specific memories—from a childhood trauma of being caught in an escalator, to remembrances of mental health issues as a teen, to problems in pregnancy, to a consideration of morality and legacy—so that the reader is left considering their own timeline, mapping out parallel events that lead from there to here, from then to now.
Later, near the end of the book, In “nesting doll” (now singular), McNair explores the way memory laces itself between generations of women, and how it shapeshifts in tricky ways, beginning with a sharp opening line: “I’ve been told my memories are not my own.” She then plums the depths of the power of story, writing: “I try to say—without the stories, there’s barely anything left of a person. Even if the stories aren’t entirely right, they breathe a bit of life into the flat images. Our memories are not our own. Your memories are not complete.” In each memory, in each photo that is fixed by a magnet to a fridge or taped to a wall, or posted on social media, we create a trail of story that moves from one generation to the next, and beyond.
In “nesting doll,” coming as it does near the close of the work, McNair perhaps alludes to her new understanding of her own identity as it has come to rise from family lineage and the passage of time.
Stylistically, McNair’s collection is a hybrid collage that weaves poetic memoir with black and white photographs—assorted images of historical documents and charts, medical settings, two children’s dresses, a clutch of garlic at the writer’s feet, a piece of fruit, a flower—that dovetail the text. This suits the fluidity of the text, in my mind, because the writing is so honest and raw that readers are offered glimpses into the writer’s point of view in documenting a life’s journey. It feels voyeuristic, at times, reading these fragments of someone’s life, as if you’re reading their diary and shouldn’t be doing so. It’s this draw inwards that is compelling, pulling the reader from piece to piece.
While questions of illness and mortality are present in Toxemia, there is also such a great sense of hope in the celebration of persistence, and of surviving of difficult things It’s there in how the reader can eavesdrop on a choir singing inside a cathedral in “pacem,” and in the insistent voice of “get up,” and in “records,” when McNair writes of her husband, “And then we were we. He makes me laugh. I don’t laugh enough. Never was a kinder look. His eyes—his beautiful eyes.” Too, it is also in the “glow record” and legacy that McNair has created in her work here, for herself, and her loved ones, and perhaps especially for her children.
I suppose that’s what I loved most about this book: McNair writes of the pain and loss of control that comes with physical and mental health challenges, in how our bodies are frustrating animals (especially when we come to realize we have so very little control over them), and still it is also about resilience, bravery, and the need to formulate connections through time and space, and in our current lives. So, Toxemia speaks to the hard-won values of persistence and survival—of managing life’s challenges—but it also rises to celebrate the tenacity of the blooming that arrives alongside the struggle. There’s such beauty in that revelation, and perhaps that it why this work is so gloriously more about growth and strength than about destruction or weakness.
Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest full collection of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and she's just published a poetry chapbook, Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). She is the First Vice-Chair for The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, has just been published by Latitude 46 Publishing. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com