Editorial Note by Max Wallis
This week I’m proud to share a poem by my co-editor/contributing-editor, Dr Anna Percy. Anna has developed what she calls “Mad Informed Punctuation”: a system where [] marks a short breath and [ ] a longer one, mapping lived experience of bipolar disorder and survival directly onto the page.
In Xanthous Motifs [24th August 2023], form and content are inseparable. The poem veers between grief, sex, memory, and absurd beauty: jars of mustard smashed in a kitchen, a marigold paisley plate, a fur coat of mercury. The breath marks fracture the flow, refusing ease or containment. Reading aloud, you find yourself gasping, halting, pushing through, inhabiting the body of the poem as much as its imagery.
This is what we want The Aftershock Review to do: to insist that poetry makes space for trauma, madness, and survival on their own terms. Anna’s poem does not just tell you about grief or inheritance or the body, it makes you feel the rhythm of living through them.
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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