Hypochondria, Least Powerful of the Greek Gods

In this engaging and moving collection, Emily Paige Wilson mythologizes the thinking, feeling, and embodied self, balancing myth-making with lucid and lyric first-person utterances in which the speaker unfolds what ails her: anxiety, cysts, infections, aches. These poems — as wise as they are searching, as tender as they are fierce — come in a dazzling variety of forms and voices, offering us many angles on their subject, which is, ultimately, the pain of inhabiting a body and mind that feel things acutely and relentlessly. With the empath’s capacity to experience others’ suffering as intimately as her own, Wilson gives the lie to the notion that hypochondria arises from obsessive self-focus, revealing a set of harder but perhaps more hopeful truths. First, compassion is a lonely business if not reciprocated. Second, true empathy makes distinctions between my flesh and yours, my fate and yours, moot. In the end, the book’s question might be this: how can we live less fearfully, more joyfully in ailing, aging, vulnerable, desiring bodies? And the answer might be together.