Kyla Jamieson

Body Count

Kyla Jamieson

Body Count focuses on Jamieson’s experience with a concussion and post-concussion syndrome and deals with the embodied costs of misogyny, the hostilities and precarities of life under neoliberal global capitalism, connection amidst the proliferation of persuasive technologies and the dizzying escapism of romance and pleasure—before the roughly chronological text is interrupted by a brain injury and its attendant symptoms: migraines, light and sound sensitivity, proprioceptive and ocular dysfunction, cognitive deficits, memory impairment, anxiety, depression, irritability, weakness and fatigue. Jamieson’s poems use plain language to journey through dreamscapes and pain states in search of new understandings of self and worth. Body Count is about the toll illness takes, but it is also an insistence that the body, and somatic ways of knowing, count. This is the first poetry collection by a Canadian writer to illuminate the experience of a concussion and PCS, which is a deceptively simple medical diagnosis used to describe a constellation of symptoms requiring a multitude of treatments, therapies and exercises.