The Lyme Letters: Poems

By C. R. Grimmer

The Lyme Letters is epistolary verse that spells out a memoir. R, a non-binary femme character, narrates their experience of disease and recovery through recurrent letters to doctors, pets, family members, lovers, and a “Master.” R, in letter form and repurposed religious texts, also explores the paradoxical experiences of queer non-reproductivity, chronic illness and disability, and the healing that can be found in the liminal spaces between.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781682830765

Book preview

DISCLAIMER:

The poems in this ebook will differ slightly in layout from their original print versions. Due to the nature of ebooks, lines will break in places other than those the author originally intended. Please Consult the print version for the author’s intended layout.

Series Editor's Foreword

From the moment I began reading The Lyme Letters, I became fascinated by the many dearests that populate C. R. Grimmer’s book, this year’s winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry at Texas Tech University Press. Grimmer—who also goes by Chelsea and uses both she/her and they/them pronouns—has written a collection in which admission and disclosure to these beloveds becomes the lens through which we readers understand R’s (the speaker’s) history and its consequences.

One day at summer camp, R finds a tick on their belly. Ticks smell first the reddest moments, R recalls. The camper dripped with the smell of it. As we learn how this moment radiates outward to shape R’s life—as we read letters to R’s family members, doctors and psychologists, pets and other beloved animals—we also come to understand the overlapping vectors that shape R’s experience of chronic disease, which in this collection is Lyme disease. The Lyme Letters places God, queer desire, and history at the site of the tick bite. It insists we see these forces intimately, both as in personally relational and as in essential, making it a book unlike others before it to consider similar forces in isolation. It is one of the best debut collections of poetry I have ever read.

Grimmer invokes the Talmudic god of prophesied plagues and punishment often throughout The Lyme Letters, raising questions of fate and judgment alongside R’s illness and treatment. Throughout the collection, R describes ticks in reddened, biblical swarms, summoning the plagues of Egypt. In the second iteration of My Dearest of Pyramids, My Fisher of Logical Men & Teddy Bears, I hear the push-pull of leaving one version of a god behind in favor of something new, perhaps not even yet fully realized. R says first I tell you again: // I am good enough / for your heaven, but at the poem’s end declares I see I AM /good enough now but what are the odds // I choose any heaven other than mine / own set before me? Here, R begins to shape their own spirituality—they’ve found the door to their own heaven, whatever that might become. They must build the god they need in order to survive.

I see world-making-as-survival at work not only in The Lyme Letters’ poems about God, but also about desire, specifically queer desire. Some of the collection’s most erotic poems, all sharing the title My Dearest Family Members, Blood Co-op & Never-Ending Transfusions, tell the story (iteratively) of the moment R’s tick is discovered. "Ticka ticka ticka ticka chant just-teen-camp-girls, opens one version of this scene. Tickling each other, chipped-polish fingers, eyes of grass, lakes, & mossy tree bark look up: some sticks for hair, a sun, & fish pools. One girl hits puberty mid-week." It’s the teen-camp-girls who’re ultimately tasked, fascinated, with removing R’s tick—a moment where pain and pleasure fuse for R:

Parading ends & camp girls argue: who gets to remove the beast & who becomes the beast? Angle your body, sunlight to map the view you fish for tweezers so that angle can crouch close and pry for the kill. Try it again: pointy tweezers take to the dotty-body & squeeze. You want to place slippery palms on that slick-blonde head; you want & you shudder at the tweak-pain of pulling it out.

Like the locusts of Exodus doing the work of God’s wrath without any of God’s agency, here the fated tick arrives only to perform its life’s function—bite, infect—and then die. Ticks—says R—do not have desires. Ticks do not have worlds. But R, marked with the red halo of its bite, lives forever in a world shaped by this moment. The nascent queer eroticism that defines this same series of poems suggests to me that R’s work building a world for themselves truly begins this summer, where so much about their body and its wants becomes suddenly known and changed. R—a nonbinary femme whose attraction to others is not bordered by gender—discloses that, that summer, they desired-a-boy-desired-a-girl but more than that desired lake skin. This same shimmering, wet skin becomes host for dual hungers: both R’s and the tick’s.

The Lyme Letters’ epistolary forms move beyond familiar relationships to also include what I’d loosely call letters of utility—a rare move for a poetic form so often characterized by romantic disclosures or philosophical grappling and one that powerfully highlights R’s ongoing labor on behalf of their own survival. In particular, Grimmer’s inclusion of accommodation-request letters to and from R’s doctors and landlords captures the tangled power networks that people with chronic illness and disabilities must navigate in order to function in a society