Unbecoming, Suzette Bishop
Ethel Zine, 2026
Unbecoming is a brilliant guide to being. Suzette Bishop’s new chapbook bears her signature polyphonic weave of personal story and source texts. I have followed Bishop, a poetic innovator for decades; once again I am in awe. Generating energy as she juxtaposes scientific findings with childhood fairytales, Bishop illuminates her cyclic struggles with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Each discourse reverberates viscerally:
“impairments
can affect multiple domains, with this
recognition, however,
can
come existential despair. Begin
to construct a new self. I play
the Eleventh [Elf] in the
school play. In some versions, she and the Twelfth Fairy are interrupted by the
Evil Thirteenth when she casts her spell. In other versions,
she finishes her blessing,
‘Take this gift of peace of soul, be thou ever true and whole.’”
The poet etches her excruciating pain on this book’s pages, playing with visual space: “Quicksand” “blender” “lagging” stagger diagonally down the page with great space between the words. Readers feel the weight of her weariness.
“If I drew, I’d draw that invisible energy waterfalling out of ME. Identities are called into question / chronic sorrow, more loss of material possessions.”
Stunningly beautiful word choices generate a music that “lift us, pulling and floating us.” Her word play begins with her title. Symptoms of her disease are “unbecoming” behaviors to many around her. ME/CFS itself is a process of “unbecoming”—a shedding to recreate. ME, which can stand for myalgic encephalomyelitis also serves as a pronoun for Bishops’s continually new made self “ME.” There are elves inside selves: some help, some harm. It is an embodied dance the poet describes with haunting precision. “My legs go numb during a walk, my spindle prick.” Or, “me in a dead heap in sweats and a hoodie.” As the disease continually peels parts of her away, she forfeits her bike, her horse, her clothes, her books. Readers watch it all wane.
“No baking.
No driving on highways,
No pacing while lecturing,
No walking in the park,
No cleaning,
No cooking,
No one over…”
Bishop organizes the chapbook via phases of the disease, yet her sophisticated weave of source texts and poignant examples reveal a cycle that overlaps and repeats endlessly. A diagnosis helps at times and at times not. The tension is palpable. I cringe at the cast of characters who resist understanding the disease: the doctor who cuts her off, the mother-in-law who offers inappropriate gifts, the friends who “can’t make sense of her,” nurses who call her lazy.
Can new ME/CFS friends—a group Bishop calls WE-CFS—help? Bishop is one of 24 million living with this disease. Her devoted partner is a sustaining force. Old friends plus new experts plus therapists plus acupuncturists plus promising students help the poet rewrite her illness narrative again and again.
“‘We’re excited and nervous back stage, the twelve of us, the first time I’ve been at school at night and not used to seeing dark out the windows, everything inside magically rushing forward even more because of that. WE avoid flattening each other’s newly sewn-on wings …. .”
Bishop takes flight in many ways: she “writes about it, makes videos, does podcasts.” A virtuoso at poetry she generates vitality. Her juxtapositions create propulsion. Her stamina sustains us. I could not put this chapbook down and have returned to it again and again, discovering something I’d overlooked each time. Bishop teaches us to see. Bishop teaches us to cultivate empathy. Unbecoming is a generous gift. Thank you for writing it Suzette. Thank you, Christina Baltais for Unbecoming's stunning cover: the collage entitled “Best Practices?” echoes questions Bishop raises. This Canadian artist is vital part of “WE/CFS” too.
Lori Anderson Moseman’s recent work is the
chapbook Whittle Gristle from
above/ground press (2025). Quietly
Between, a 2022 poetry/photography collaboration, is available from A
Viewing Space. Okay and Too Few Words were above/ground press
chapbooks in 2023. Her experimental poetry collections include Darn (Delete Press, 2021) and Y (Operating System, 2019). For her
earlier prose poems see Full Quiver
(Propolis Press, 2015) and Flash Mob
(Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). For samples of those books and her archive, see https://loriandersonmoseman.com.
She lives in Eugene OR.
