PITIFUL
Part self-interrogation, part confession, part hospital diary, the intense, heartbreakingly frank poems in Brandi Bird’s second collection detail the author’s struggles with and recovery from eating disorders. These poems challenge and bend the relationships between sexuality, appetite, voyeurism and the body while critiquing restraint, inaction and self-victimization. Bird asks who, if anyone, will be rescued?
In the tradition of poets like Amy Berkowitz (Tender Points) and Hannah Green (Xanax Cowboy), the poems in Pitiful lay bare the way patriarchy, medical sexism, and bigotry have not only sabotaged the treatment of such conditions but often make them worse.