Bodies | 47.3

2024

I am a person of words; it is how I make sense of the world. For years, my body felt like an obstacle to my thinking self. I would push it beyond its limits, and inevitably, it would rebel. “Use your words,” I wanted to say to it, as one might to a toddler having a tantrum. Yet intensifying negotiations with my body on multiple fronts—mental illness, chronic pain, dysphoria—have forced me to communicate with my body intimately beyond words. The Bodies issue emerged from my need to explore the relationship between those two worlds: my words, and my body. A year later, I am left with the resounding feeling that these writings have helped me process something immense in the depths of my mind.

The essays, stories, poems, and interviews in Bodies are a blueprint for saying the unsayable, for writing the wordless. Commissioned writer Suzan Palumbo digs into the alchemical magic of making decisions about our bodies for the first time in “Feathered,” while Hana Mason’s “Lunch” grapples with the hungry consequences of swallowing the destructive narratives we are fed. The feverish intensity of “in which it is two am and i am staring in a mirror” is an undercurrent throughout: the body is immediate, pressing, overwhelming. Amanda Leduc faces this pressure with intentional slowness, and echoes of disability justice reverberate through the poems surrounding her interview.

Even in the sticky bits, the undercurrent that emerges is one of love. In pieces about chronic pain, disability, and mental illness, there are through-lines of community, radical care, and self-affirmation. In poems centring trans bodies, the deep self-love that drives the choice to shape our bodies shines through. In such a varied collection of works, the one truth is that all of our bodies are singularly remarkable things worthy of dignity, generous care, and all the love we can possibly muster.

The issue you hold in your hands would not have come together without the work and bravery of the over 1,000 writers and artists who submitted to this issue. I also owe a huge thank you to my fellow editors Lena Belova, Sadie Graham, and Eleni Vlahiotis for their dedication, support, and sharp insights. It is in your hands now; I hope reading it is as profound an experience for you as editing it was for me.

—Nara Monteiro