The COVID-19 pandemic has been a cruel paradox for many of us. We have been forced to isolate ourselves from the world in order to survive an ever-mutating virus while we are hungering for touch and social connection, longing to be seen—both literally and metaphorically—by the people we love most. Maggie Nelson’s Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth offers a diaristic view into that struggle.
In her characteristic genre-bending style, Nelson (Bluets, The Argonauts) stretches poetic verse to the brink of prose to chronicle the life of a working spouse and parent. There are descriptions of homeschooling and Zoom readings; texts from the partner of a dying friend and mentor, C; and lines evincing the speaker’s burgeoning discovery of the hairline cracks in a marriage stressed by diverging desires and responsibilities. At the center of it all is an undiagnosable and untreatable mouth pain that sends the speaker from practitioner to practitioner, trying remedies that range, as she admits, from the mundane to the ridiculous.
Pathemata is a fascinating study in how collective and individual suffering can isolate us but also teach us the necessity of fully inhabiting each moment of our lives. In this collection, which flows seamlessly from pain-addled dreams to medical summaries, Nelson engages with the question: How does one live with pain, and how does one live in the moments in between? Like any good poet, she does not offer an answer as much as a series of observations. As Nelson makes clear, it is difficult to learn anything meaningful during a catastrophe, and even our most loving intentions sometimes fall short of connecting us to each other. However, it is still possible to survive, to appreciate what is, and to live robustly, even as fear and exhaustion threaten to swallow us whole.
The word pathemata, one half of the Greek phrase pathemata mathemata (“knowledge gained through adversity”), can mean either “suffering” or “passion.” Nelson leans beautifully into this ambiguity, acknowledging that, for many of us, the first half of the 2020s has been riddled with heartbreak, but, as one particularly touching letter written in the voice of the speaker’s deceased father states, “Life is beautiful and painful and precious . . . a lovely ride.”
