Editorial Note by Max Wallis
Continuing section IV’s theme of PSYCHOSIS / SURVIVAL / HALLUCINATIONS is Jenny Pagdin with her second poem, Hypochondria of the heart. Here Pagdin extends the theme of suspended unease first struck in Before we got the news. Where the earlier poem holds us in the static crackle before catastrophe, this one turns inward, to a homesickness that cannot be resolved. The old diagnosis becomes a way of naming exile within the body: a conscript’s heartbeat against stone, a child’s fevered cry for home, an adult sensing blood that “pumps apathetically.” Pagdin threads the personal through history and weather, showing how longing and illness blur. The poem closes on an open suitcase, a stark emblem of absence and unfinished departure. Together, her poems inhabit the charged space between dread and survival, the mind and body registering damage before words can.
But through these words, it can.
It does.
Hypochondria of the heart
by Jenny Pagdin
The old name for homesickness:
a conscript would feel his beating life
tick for the last time, hip to stone;
leave a cold stare against the graphite sky.
As a fevered child tucked up on the sofa,
I would cry and cry for home.
For years now, I have sensed my blood
pumping apathetically.
The air still hangs silently, and sometimes
clouds comb the delible rain
into the sea. An empty suitcase, open.
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About the author:
Jenny Pagdin is the author of The Snow Globe (Nine Arches, 2024) and Caldbeck (Eyewear, 2017), both exploring her experiences of postpartum psychosis. Winner of the 2024 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry, she was highly commended in the Bridport Prize, shortlisted for the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition, and placed second in the Café Writers Prize. Her work appears in Poetry London, Magma, The Emma Press, and elsewhere.
