Ovarium: Poems

By Joanna Ingham

Tender, loving and visceral, Ovarium is a pamphlet of poems about a giant ovarian cyst. The poet charts her journey with the cyst, from diagnosis to surgery to recovery, via a landscape of scanner rooms and hospital wards.

The poems explore the impact of illness, and the body as a site of disgust and shame but also healing and endurance. Ingham's poems are forensic as she looks at the disorientating and sometimes patriarchal language of anatomy and medicine, and the way illness can change the relationship we have with our own bodies.
I tried to think of you as fruit, growing
against the sun-warm wall of my gut.
Melon-headed, you nudged the leafy organs,
dug out a place for yourself in the plot.
I never guessed. I was only bloody earth
to you, a coldframe full of light.

- from 'Cyst'

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Emma Press
• Release date: Jun 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781915628053

Joanna Ingham

Joanna Ingham writes poetry and fiction. She grew up in Suffolk and has recently returned to live there after 20 years in London and Hertfordshire. Naming Bones, her debut pamphlet, was published by Ignition Press in 2019 and she won the Paper Swans Press Single Poem Competition in 2020. She has worked in community arts, facilitating creative writing workshops in a wide variety of settings. She lives with her husband and daughter.

Book preview

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OVARIUM

PRAISE FOR OVARIUM

‘‘I tried to think of you as fruit, growing/against the sun-warm wall of my gut.’ And so begins Joanna Ingham’s Ovarium, a piercing study of one woman’s diagnosis, the resulting fear, and then quest to understand the complexities of her own body. In poems that both surprise and inform, Ingham gives us the female body under threat, under examination, under male scrutiny, and refuses to censor or sanitise. The writing is beautiful, accomplished; each observation raw and moving. I dare you not to feel excited and enriched.’ —Rebecca Goss

‘This stunning and beautifully crafted pamphlet by Joanna Ingham reads a little like a love letter to a lost ovary. Ingham explores how sudden and unexpected illness can inhabit us, making us hyper aware of parts of our body we rarely pay attention to, and how hospitals (and medical professionals) while saving us can also dehumanise us – becoming both devil and saviour. A compulsive and exciting read.’ —Julia Webb

‘Reading Joanna Ingham’s Ovarium is a revelation. Imaginative, incisive and often disturbing, Ingham’s latest pamphlet unravels the hidden power, guises and secrets of women. It offers an original cartography of women’s bodies, mapping out the visible pains