The River Pouring Through My Body is Giving Me an Ear Infection is an exploration of found material and how different words and phrases can recombine to articulate new ideas outside of their original contexts. Collaged in with the reconstituted verse are an overarching prose narrative and visceral (and eviscerating) photograms representative of the migraine headaches the author suffers from. The title stems from a bad dream, from the feeling that one is being poisoned by forces that are deeply internal. Intimate and reflective, this multi-media book offers meditations on anxiety, love, chronic pain, and the meaning of being present in one’s own life.
«Like the great philosopher Simone Weil, whose migraine “affliction” became the wellspring of insight into human suffering writ large, Elodie Hollant’s account of living with chronic pain offers a dazzling, phenomenologically intimate map of self-knowledge. "I live in a house with a tin roof/ and every time it rains,/ I can feel my brain." Giving language to ongoing neurophysical distress is a daunting project; making that language beautiful is a still greater ambition. Supplemented by gorgeous photographs that track the intricacies of sensation, The River Pouring Through My Body is Giving Me an Ear Infection enters the stream of human bodily experience with passion and beauty, enticing the reader to share her harrowing inner life. Paradoxically, it is an elemental pleasure to do so!»
—Maria Damon
«So haptic & deeply unpleasant, really impressive. Very clever vowel sounds. I feel very uncomfortable, it’s like evil ASMR. What a talent.»
—Gabriel Smith
«Elodie Hollant makes her headache into art!
She takes us into a private universe she creates in word and image.
Delicate, mysterious, compelling.
I need the gleam of new pain(t).
She cries for more pain and we cry for more poem.»
—Jill Hoffman
