Ode to the Migraineur: A Review of Hemicrania
Maybe it’s the perimenopause talking, but more and more I feel as if I’m surrounded by migraineurs. It took years for me to recognize the multifaceted ways that my migraines erupt: to confidently name one as such, discern between migraines and sinus infections, understand the seemingly infinite triggers, and find palliatives.
I naturally gravitated, then, toward Therese Gleason’s beautiful chapbook, Hemicrania. While consistently playing with poetic form and function, Gleason offers readers a textured story of episodic and chronic migraines: the ebb and flow of pain triggers, detached medical evaluations and diagnoses, and the matrilineal disposition toward migraines. Gleason situates the story in her painful experiences; at the same time, she often pulls, rearranges, and experiments with language from other migraineurs, her family, medical professionals, homeopaths, archival texts, and Catholicism. The effect of the poems is a palpable conveyance of the excruciating complexities of migraines.
An overarching theme in Hemicrania is the patronizing advice and attitudes foisted on migraineurs, especially women. Gleason cites twentieth-century archives in which medical practitioners assert that women with migraines simply need to be guided toward “how to live / more calmly and happily.” “In Her/My Head” is a fitting juxtaposition to these assertions: the poem is in two columns with the left-hand column consisting of a set of doctor’s notes and the right-hand column humanizing the patient’s pain, panic, and exhaustion. From these careful juxtapositions, readers will gather that, while much has changed in the science and treatment of migraines, the language surrounding migraines continues to be heavily inflected with sexist attitudes. Across these poems, readers will discern the implications of treatment focused on how the migraineur handles stress, rather than on a conscious dismantling of a system that overburdens women and mothers, multitaskers who must succumb to pain and keep going. Further, “In Her/My Head” plays with the function of doctors’ notes as a genre, showing how inhumane the seeming objectivity of the medical profession appears when laid in column form next to a patient’s lived experience.
Gleason demonstrates these inequities as well as the connection among women in poems about her daughter, mother, and great-grandmother. In “Incantation,” we read the names of women in her family who have suffered and gone; she says three Hail Marys to “ask for their strength.” In “Migraineur,” she remembers tending to her mother lying in agony and wonders about the “psychic sources / carried forward in the souls of cells / that remember fractured attachments” as she sits helplessly with her daughter, who is receiving an IV. “A Kind of Brainstorm”—a collage positioned on its side—includes an image of her great-grandmother, Eva, catty-corner from a drawing labeled “5 Malformations of the Skull.” This collage is another instance of Gleason’s use of poetic form and juxtaposition to call up the palpable feelings of a migraine: a certainty that all of one’s senses are a bit off, a sideways disorientation toward the world, and a scattering of images and words to be sussed through the pain. And in “Maiden, Mother, Crone,” Gleason pulls from a 1938 advertisement in a newspaper for a “vegetable compound” meant to address “nerves” and alleviate “the functional disorders which women must endure.” The ad was published in the Rolfe Arrow, a newspaper that Gleason discovered in her research and says her great-grandmother would have likely read, as Rolfe was the town nearest her farm in Iowa.
The first time a migraine happened to me in any identifiable way was in Iowa. I could only see out of one eye, and around this eye floated a spinning wheel of light, made up of pinched paramecium shapes, as if I were peering at squirming beings through a microscope. Hours later, after a CT scan at the ER, I learned I wasn’t on the brink of death: it was only a migraine, they said. Nearly twenty years after this diagnosis, in quarantine, I reclined on my bed with a pulsating migraine. My seven-year-old pressed her hand against my forehead. Guilt washed over me because she was worried: she intuited that big changes were coming. And I couldn’t rise to this occasion, in another instance where my body chose to shatter my head: when I needed to be thinking the most clearly, when I needed to be strategic. I couldn’t go into the sunshine with my kid or pluck apart dandelions or marvel at the blossoming dogwoods. “I worry my children will remember how I took to my bed, checked out of life,” writes Gleason in the poem “In Bed.” Oh, how I worried that day, and others. Migraines are buzzkills, after all. They arrest mothers in an insidious loop that is difficult to explain to the loved ones who are counting on us.
Migraines feel like such a lonely—and invisible, when you’re not puking—condition. By the end of Hemicrania, I felt much less lonely. I felt the press of the migraineurs I know, and it was comforting: the friend who drapes pastel tissue paper over the bright lights in her office, the little girl who vomits from headache nausea, the writer I interviewed who brilliantly answered my questions with her eyes closed, rubbing her temples, for the duration. I felt the warmth of Gleason’s matrilineal narrative from her great-grandmother to her daughter. I felt the intricacies of ritual—through Catholic prayer, herbalism, twentieth-century advertisements, and natural remedies from 950 C.E. to now—tethered to poems such as “Migraine Disability Assessment Test 1,” a blackout poem with the repeated phrase “many days” reflecting the deep extent to which migraines affect minutes and hours of one’s life. I felt the vivid and various manifestations of migraines in Gleason’s visual play, such as the blurring of lines in “Aura” that imitate partial vision or, in “Cortical Spreading Depression,” the use of asterisks to create a visceral shape reminiscent of a migraine’s disorienting effects. In “Self-Portrait as Barometer,” I nodded along to the initial line: “I knew it would rain today.” Yes: that pain, presupposing weather. For anyone who experiences migraines, or who cares about someone with chronic or episodic migraines, Hemicrania is a beacon for community and understanding as well as a beautiful inquiry into poetic form and experimentation.