Editorial Note by Max Wallis
In The C Word Diaries, Dr Anna Percy’s second poem in Issue One, we are thrown back into the beginnings of the pandemic, and the unknown tension of a world we were about to lose. It is mid March 2020, days before 23 March when lockdown is announced. The poem keeps close to what that week felt like at street level. Parcels on doorsteps. Empty shelves. Quarantine rules forming in real time. The hunger for touch that keeps turning into risk. Humour and horror in the same breath. An ordinary flat becomes a stage for panic, kindness, sex, boredom, care. A holding pen for fear and tenderness. There is a litany of language to hold us in place: thermometer, mint Aero, leopard scarf, XL condoms, a futon. The catalogue is deliberate. It is clutter and it is control.
Form carries the charge and the argument. Anna’s Mad Informed Punctuation registers breath rather than grammar, with [] marking a short intake and [ ] a longer pause. Read aloud and the body sets the score. Start, stop, restart. Meaning lands where the lungs land. The diary syntax builds pressure through lists and returns, letting practical detail do the emotional work. Here, form is also a political choice. The poem refuses the demand to be tidy or well behaved, and in doing so insists that a mad-informed poetics can hold public crisis and private need at once.
What convinces is how the poem holds its contradictions without blinking. Desire in the shadow of risk. Care and irritation sharing the same room. Scarcity beside excess. There is movement without neat stanzas. We travel from crisis logistics, to the awkward comedy of sex and consent while rules coalesce, to the quiet admission of what isolation withholds and what survives. Humour is not decoration here. It is survival. The result is exact, unsentimental, and memorable. If we talk about an Aftershock ethos, this is it. Not only the damage, but the ways we keep breathing through, with the disorder still showing.
About Anna:
Dr Anna Percy, a bisexual poet with bipolar disorder, completed her groundbreaking thesis at MMU: Bipolar Magpie: a 21st Century Embodied Eco-Feminist Poetics, focused on mad studies and eco-poetry. She has three collections with Flapjack Press and co-founded Stirred Poetry. Her work blends performance, experimental poetics, feminism, and the natural world, shaped by two decades of community teaching and a commitment to redefining what it means to be a madidentified scholar. She is Contributing Editor at The Aftershock Review.
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