Is This Scary?: Poems

By Jacob Scheier

A challenging exploration of mental illness and disability from Governor General’s Award winner Jacob Scheier.

Is This Scary? digs deep into internal landscapes of suffering, including depression and anxiety, chronic physical ailment, and rare neurological malady. With its many eccentric songs and odes to medications and medical procedures, this book is full of both levity and unapologetic lament. Pushing back against societal stigma, Is This Scary? unflinchingly addresses experiences of psychiatric institutionalization and suicidality, without either romanticizing or pathologizing them. Scheier rejects much of the mainstream cultural views of mental illness, subverting the biochemical model by emphasizing the radical subjectivity of mental suffering. While the poems render the difficulty of communicating pain to others, they defiantly celebrate its expression and evocation through visceral lyricism.

Scheier also challenges our culture’s desire to be inspired by stories of “triumphing” over illness and disability. Nothing is overcome here, the journey from illness to wellness is one of narrative and aesthetic disruption. The perpetually incomplete search for self and home is ultimately at the heart of this book: along with being a person with disabilities, the poet-speaker identifies as a Diaspora-Jew, engaging exile as a chronic state of being that isn’t intended to be resolved, but rather explored, expressed, and honored.

Ode to Prednisone

Herr Pill! You murder sleep.
Eugenicist Cortisol, re-make me—
ox-strong, moon-faced, onioned-skin.
Hugs are dangerous.
Performance-enhancing drug for poets—
you triple feelings. Elegies for the late train & spilled milk.
Anxiety is Everything.
Threatened by the light that brightens the dark.
Dread tolerates Ativan.
Faustian Chemical, you resurrect myths
like Lazarus. He was never the same.
Charon-ian Steroid,
I’ve been to that shore the dead clamour for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Apr 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781773057200

Book preview

Cover: Is This Scary? Poems by Jacob Scheier

Is This Scary?

Poems

Jacob Scheier

ECW Press Logo

Dedication

Dear Sam, This Isn’t a Suicide Note

Palinopsia Song or Ode to Some Fucking Bird

Ode to Prednisone

Crohn’s Song

Symptoms Include a Compulsive Desire to be Understood

Poem for a Broken Bone

Election Night in the Ward

Ode to Zopiclone

To My Friends Who Did Not Visit Me in the Mental Hospital

Circular Labyrinth

The Chestnut Tree Café

Self-Parenting

Noonday Yahweh

Song for a Colonoscopy

The Spaz

To a Child Whose Mother Has Not Yet Died

Song to the Suicides

Note

Metamorphosis

Jumbo Elegy

God as We Understood Him

On Missing a Train Stop

Songs from an Emergency Room

Nearly 50% of Toronto Islands underwater after recent deluge of rain: City

In Praise of Losing Things

Ode to Remicade

Infusion Song

And Then Job Answered God from inside the Whirlwind They Were Both Caught inside Of

Job’s Girlfriend

Lamotrigine Song

Re: hey, and i might have cancer

Harold and Maude Revisited

Wanting to Not Want to Die

My Last Depression

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

Dedication

For Brad

Dear Sam, This Isn’t a Suicide Note

In a way, it’s an anti-suicide letter.

But I understand if you don’t read it

because you may have already killed yourself

as we agreed was your right. We saw it the same way

during that war on ourselves or, to be more straightforward,

the Psych Ward. There were plenty of atheists

in that foxhole, not to mention the occasional Satanist

like the Zyprexa-shut-eyed girl

who lost internet privileges for feeding

her psychosis on occult sites. But they

didn’t take away my copy of The Divine Comedy

because it was Christian I guess

and I was merely depressed.

You were the only unmedicated person on the floor.

First mental patient I’ve ever known diagnosed

purely with an existential crisis. Though when a resident

mentioned Cymbalta, you were adamant:

didn’t want a pill to take away what little you felt,

even if it was pain. I wondered,

doing my best Mrs. Ramsay, if the right med

could make you see a silvered, rough wave

and proclaim, It is enough! It is enough!

But didn’t say so, as I hadn’t read

To the Lighthouse since this condition

caused waves to appear sharp, jagged. Like everything else

in this world, piercing. And you had a point

about the pill. Neither the benzos nor gaba-

pentin had caused me to give up entirely

on the idea of suicide.

The most well-groomed

mental patient I ever saw, you must have shaved

every day before breakfast. Your neck gleamed

in your colour-guarded

V-necks. With my sagging beard

and untamed blond hair, I looked like Christ

but mean. Every night we walked the same square

of corridor. We discussed Camus more than Woolf.

You said you had to draw a line somewhere—

at the small but stifling compromises that

add up then suddenly define a life.

And of course there was a woman

who loved you but also didn’t.

On one of my day passes

I bought you Chekhov’s Selected

because I was sure you were in it.

My inscription said, because

you had mentioned it

as an alternative, Move to Russia.

Don’t kill yourself. I didn’t

sign my name. I told you my plans

when I got out: therapy, MBCT, volunteer

somewhere, find god, keep busy. You said