I’m a few months into the launch of Toxemia, my hybrid poetic memoir with Book*hug Press and feel lucky to have had a few readings and reviews along with some private messages and correspondence from folks I admire. It’s such an oddly tender thing to put out a book like this. I can’t always read people at the best of times and with this work it feels like it cost more in the production. Cost more to write (emotionally), cost more to finish (time-wise in time of ongoing medical stuff) and costs more to sit in front of it (in terms of vulnerability). I hope the book will find the readers that get it. And I’m always appreciative when anyone tells me what they think of it because it is such a lonely thing in some ways.
My non-fiction poetic memoir creature was included on the CBC Books list of 44 Canadian poetry collections to watch for in 2024 and the 49th Shelf’s Most Anticipated Fall 2024 Poetry and the CBC Books list of Canadian Books we can’t wait to read in October. The cover featuring collage art by Kate Sutherland (typeset by graphic designer Gareth Lind) was on the Hamilton Review of Books’ Face Out: Our Favourite Book Covers of 2024 list.
Hollay Ghadery was kind enough to extend the panel discussion at The & festival at Sheridan College with Paige Maylott and Maurice Vellekoop into a three-way interview on navigating vulnerabilities in life writing. (As aside — https://quillandquire.com/omni/students-writers-rally-to-support-sheridan-writing-program-facing-suspension/. Support those rallying.) I truly appreciated the initial discussion and then reading my co-panelists responses to these post-panel questions. A bit from one of my answers to Hollay’s question about our respective chosen forms: “I’ve noticed during the readings that I’ve been doing that I’m still seen as ‘poet’ but the book itself is very much not entirely that. There are some things that play with prose poetry and I do play a bit in the margins but it’s just that the prose isn’t always linear. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it is poetry. The word choices are strange. But maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m just strange. I like things to be compound and alchemical.”
I got quite sick at the end of 2024 along with both kids so I fell behind in my year-end-wrap-up-tasks like responding to the Book*hug Wrapped 2024 Authors edition. Really grateful though for my fellow author Stephen Cain‘s mention of Toxemia in his list! Kate Sutherland also included Toxemia in her list of ten of the most exciting & challenging books she encountered in 2024.
A couple of the fall readings are available online — notably the cabaret with Amanda Earl at an Ottawa writers festival event with book sales by Perfect Books (sadly Sandra Ridley couldn’t be there) as well as my reading as part of the Single Onion reading series in Calgary with rob mclennan and the Magpie Poets (haiku group) at Shelf Life Books.
Reviews and some other things:
Kim Fahner wrote a thoughtful review for periodicities:
“While questions of illness and mortality are present in Toxemia, there is also such a great sense of hope in the celebration of persistence, and of surviving of difficult things [….] I suppose that’s what I loved most about this book: McNair writes of the pain and loss of control that comes with physical and mental health challenges, in how our bodies are frustrating animals (especially when we come to realize we have so very little control over them), and still it is also about resilience, bravery, and the need to formulate connections through time and space, and in our current lives. So, Toxemia speaks to the hard-won values of persistence and survival—of managing life’s challenges—but it also rises to celebrate the tenacity of the blooming that arrives alongside the struggle. There’s such beauty in that revelation, and perhaps that it why this work is so gloriously more about growth and strength than about destruction or weakness.” (excerpt from review)
Kerry Clare also kindly wrote on Toxemia in her Recently Read section of her website:
“Christine McNair blends high and low cultures, arts and science, words and images, memoir and research to tell the story of her life as a woman with a body, a body that is so often wrong or dangerous, her symptoms and experience disbelieved, disregarded. [….] “I am now more afraid of telling doctors my history,” she writes. Though with TOXEMIA, she’s made art of that story, a moving and compelling narrative, strange and edgy, unsettling. Unputdownable.” (excerpt from review)
Michael Bryson included Toxemia as part of his last batch of reviews on his substack in 2024:
“Christine McNair’s Toxemia makes for harrowing reading. A memoir told in lyrical essays, prose poetry, photographs and more, this book takes the reader to the edge of life [….] I started with a vague sense that this was a story about complications from pregnancy. By the time I finished, I realized what an idiot I was — and I was drowned in respect for McNair for the numerous subtle turns, explanations, and descriptions she provides of multiple near death experiences and the mysterious, tenuous connections between cause and effect, especially as related to the fragility of life and the monstrous uncertainties that regulate (or not) the human body. [… ]The narrative is non-linear, looping back and forward, pulling in historical analysis and soaking in poetic reflection. These things happened. They put her life at risk. In past centuries, they killed many women. Modern medicine continues to find them mysterious. Narrative loose ends abound, as in this situation they must. The bottom line is life persists, the book was written. And it’s terrific. One line jumped out at me: “Every body survives something. Or they don’t.” Amen.” (excerpt from review)
My partner rob mclennan also wrote on Toxemia as part of his reading in the margins project on his Substack. He wanted to tackle it in a non-review way as he can’t really write on my work neutrally in other spaces as he could any other writer due to conflict of interest because spouse-love-life-adinfinitum. He gets what I mean when I say this in his piece: “I do see it as a poetic memoir rather than a book of pure poetry. Language is important to me in both prose and poetry and this book flexes between genres on purpose. Play can be found in prose, even non-fiction prose, even a memoir, even a health-historic-body-fueled memoir filled with tough things.”
As for my posts and such — I made a video that introduces Toxemia for the Book*hug YouTube channel made of some clips of the past few years, spliced together with my voice overlaid. A few snippets of time and space.
I also wrote a small list of recommended books for 49th shelf called A List for Lost Words that focuses on books that meant something to me when I was trying to make sense of the confusion of a difficult diagnosis.
And I pulled together a playlist of songs that I associate with the memoir in one way or another for the Book*hug blog. I may have spent far too much time on this and then cursed myself for not including things that I thought of later.
Earlier praise for Toxemia:
“Toxemia is simultaneously a history in/of medicine, a feminist rallying cry, and a raw but scalpel-sharp work of poetry. A genre-blurring text that boldly bloodies lines between poetic and reproductive bodies, between archive and lyric, between manifesto and song, between autoethnography and free verse. A bodypoem flex.” —Sarah de Leeuw, author of Lot
“How much pressure can build in language before the story of women’s health blows apart? In Toxemia, Christine McNair tests the narrative as if it were a problem patient. She charts the events that bring her close to death several times with the skill of the most intuitive midwives and rigorous clinicians, though representation is not diagnostic. This is a beautiful etiological study.” —Elee Kraljii Gardiner, author of Trauma Head and Against Death: 35 Essays on Living
“Toxemia is astonishing. It’s difficult to use positive adjectives for something so searing and widespread as toxicity in all its forms as it is portrayed in this book. But what can be said is that we need this book. We need ‘a pattern that is only legible’ to McNair. If nothing else, in this undetermined narrative, we may read our multiple selves, our own fragilities to systemic damage and unutterable forces beyond our control.” —Madhur Anand, Governor General’s Literary Award–winning author of This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart
UPCOMING EVENTS
FEB 28, 2025, VANCOUVER, BC: Off the Shelf Reading Series, details forthcoming.
MAY 2025, WINNIPEG, MB: Speaking Crow reading series, details forthcoming.
FALL 2025, WOLFVILLE, NS: details forthcoming
Hope to see some of you soon and hopeful to add more readings/events as they come up in 2025!
First reading for Toxemia at Books & Company in Picton, ON as part of the PEP rally reading series.
CHRISTINE MCNAIR 