Margaret Gilbert

Blue Electrode Margaret Gilbert

"The poet's work to establish agency in the midst of sickness is so clear and hard fought, that one is filled with admiration and wonderment at the ability to carry the reader so deep into her journey with all of its subcurrents."




-MARY STEWART HAMMOND, author of Out of Canaan (W. W. Norton,

1991) & Entering History (W. W. Norton, 2016)







"These poems interrogate seizure disorder and recovery, its spectrum, the people around it, family, community. In those waters swim a sense of history, distortion, victimhood, the inevitability of scapegoating, in fact, discrimination and racism. The poems themselves seize. Their strongest light is their willingness to inhabit the very "kindling" of the neurons, "the highway clothed in goldenrod." Indeed, as the poet writes in "Blue Electrode," the title poem, "Yes, my mother thinks to herself/ tying her torn scarf, / the words Epilepsy and Woe/ are synonymous."




-RALPH BURNS, author of but not yet (Lynx House Press, 2017) Winner of

The Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, & Ghost Notes (Oberlin College Press, 2000),

Winner of The Field Poetry Prize