Body Count focuses on Jamieson's experience with a concussion and post-concussion syndrome and deals with the embodied costs of misogyny, the hostilities and precarities of life under neoliberal global capitalism, connection amidst the proliferation of persuasive technologies and the dizzying escapism of romance and pleasure-before the roughly chronological text is interrupted by a brain injury and its attendant symptoms: migraines, light and sound sensitivity, proprioceptive and ocular dysfunction, cognitive deficits, memory impairment, anxiety, depression, irritability, weakness and fatigue. Jamieson's poems use plain language to journey through dreamscapes and pain states in search of new understandings of self and worth. Body Count is about the toll illness takes, but it is also an insistence that the body, and somatic ways of knowing, count. This is the first poetry collection by a Canadian writer to illuminate the experience of a concussion and PCS, which is a deceptively simple medical diagnosis used to describe a constellation of symptoms requiring a multitude of treatments, therapies and exercises.
"Body Count focuses on Jamieson's experience with a concussion and post-concussion syndrome and deals with the embodied costs of misogyny, the hostilities and precarities of life under neoliberal global capitalism, connection amidst the proliferation of persuasive technologies, and the dizzying escapism of romance and pleasure--before the roughly chronological text is interrupted by a brain injury and its attendant symptoms: migraines, light and sound sensitivity, proprioceptive and ocular dysfunction, cognitive deficits, memory impairment, anxiety, depression, irritability, weakness and fatigue. Jamieson's poems use plain language to journey through dreamscapes and pain states in search of new understandings my self and worth. Body Count is about the toll illness takes, but it is also an insistence that the body, and somatic ways of knowing, count. This is the first poetry collection by a Canadian writer to illuminate the experience of a concussion and PCS, which is a deceptively simple medical diagnosis used to describe a constellation of symptoms requiring a multitude of treatments, therapies, and exercises."--
“In her foundational disability manifesto ‘Sick Woman Theory,’ Johanna Hedva writes that the concept of the sick woman “is for those who are faced with their vulnerability and unbearable fragility, every day, and so have to fight for their experience to be not only honoured, but first made visible.” Body Count is a gleaming artifact of that fight, in which a woman’s desire to have her pain recognized must grapple with the isolation and misunderstandings that attend being openly ill. But it is also a record of the wonders, both spectacular and mundane, that illness and disability can engender: the new poetic forms that a brain injury brings to the surface, or the way interdependence can bring a cosmic kind of depth to friendships. Kyla Jamieson’s poems put new, unsentimental and searingly funny language to the often-silencing experiences of disability and womanhood, twinned much like the unforgettable image of baby lab rats fucking in utero. Here, illness and femininity are not liabilities but ballasts in Jamieson’s rage against the patriarchal machines of CanLit, institutional hierarchies, and inaccessible public space. In refusing the able-bodied world's imperative to ‘do more / to be purposeful / like a man,’ Body Count provides not only a refuge, but also a site of life-giving resistance. After all, Jamieson writes, ‘they’re nearly / The same thing, alive / and in pain.’”
