Sick Story: a remix
If linear healing narratives are meaningless in the face of chronic illness, then what is the shape of a sick story? To explore this question, Maria Hardin borrows from Bernadette Mayer’s Story (1968) and Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction, which posits that the shape of a narrative is not an arrow, or the masculine climax, but a bag. Mayer tossed all that she was interested into the bag of her story and then gave it form. In this book is Hardin’s bag—her sick remix.
PRAISE for Sick Story:
Hardin creates a privileged altar to an uncooperative, mortal body—piled with infusion tubing, medical charts, and a creeping sense of dread. Sick Story: A Remix explores the psychic hurt that chronic illness festers, leaking lurid, anguished pus as vile as any infected wound. Both prosaic and baroque, Hardin’s aesthetic extremes mutate into a new breed of leukocyte: cloying, omnivorous, deathly. I’m shook, shivering, ready to burn all my art alongside a squadron of Marias.
– M. Forajter, Interrogating the Eye (Schism Neuronics, 2022)
Sick Story asks what happens when one’s illness refuses resolution. Inspired by Bernadette Mayer’s Story and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Maria Hardin reimagines the illness narrative in the form of a collage. Comprised of cinematic vignettes, pithy one-liners, current reading, Victorian poets, and much, much more, this is a sad, sweet, funny book that manages to do a huge amount in 48 short pages. Salve!
– Susan Finlay, The Jacques Lacan Foundation (MOIST, 2022)
About the author
Maria Hardin is a Swedish-American artist and bilingual poet based in Stockholm. She is the author of Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether (Action Books) and several chapbooks.