Dizzying Words
poems by
Claudia M. Reder
~72 pages, $14 (+ shipping)
Projected Release Date: February, 2025
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Claudia M. Reder gives readers a detailed and devastating portrait of how illness seizes the body, tosses it into a terrifying new world, and seemingly dares the poet to find her way back. Dizzying Words is that map; the poems take the reader through diagnosis, treatment, physical therapy, and memory with images so haunting and so beautiful the reader can sometimes just slip into pure enjoyment of rhythm, line, and metaphor. These poems sing and sear. ~Deirdre Neilen, Editor, The Healing Muse
Claudia Reder’s imaginative, skillful poems describe in metaphor what it is like to live with vertigo. She wanders through “the labyrinth of vertigo,” like “dancing without a floor,” as her “body splits down the road.” She states “colors / screeched, especially green and blue.” She learned “Chronic illness feels like a reprimand,” and “It is time to look at the wonder of this path / and continue.” Reder found a way through the art of poetry. ~Helga Kidder, author of five collections of poetry, the most recent, Learning Curve.
Self-Portrait from the Future
Reach for my hand, I tell her, I will take care of you.
She doesn’t respond. She doesn’t yet know
how long she will be ill, how a few days
will grow into years,
how a new normal will eventually develop.
It’s okay, I want her to know,
we will manage. But she is still reliving
that night, her eight-year-old padding
out of her bedroom asking, “Mommy, are you alright?”
Her family follows the ambulance
to the hospital where she is seen
ahead of a knife stabbing
because vertigo is the worst.
Her daughter has Doritos for breakfast
and goes to school with orange hands,
but on that eve that bisected our lives.
I wondered if I was dying
and if so how to make peace
when I found myself among a salty froth of seals.
The paramedics interrupted my reverie.
The seals receded.
Then one seal leveled his gaze,
his wrinkly nose nudging me to focus,
that seal black eye on which my eyes locked.
My breathing synchronized with his,
the water murmurs sliding up and back.
A stillness sang inside of me,
an intimate immensity.
I knew that art served a purpose.
I would create new songs.
The old ones would not do.
Girl Wrapped in Seaweed
i.
I climb out of the sea,
bewildered and naked, a Venus film noir;
tangled in seaweed,
burning from salt.
In the curling toes of the ocean
I lose my balance,
my brain sends confusing messages.
I bend down to pick up a smooth, white,
sand dollar hidden in seaweed,
that marbled whiteness in the gritty sand,
among tiny perfect shells
and fragments of larger shells
that arise out of the rocky, pebbled waters.
.
A jagged edge pinches my fingers.
I search for a slight bony perforation,
shiny with mother-of-pearl.
I hold the curved wall of the Nautilus
to my ear;
netted in the labyrinth of vertigo,
its turnings and twisting,
its insidiousness and monstrous fatigue,
Someone asks, What does it feel like? I answer:
If you climb the four flights of the Guggenheim
and from the top view the museum’s spiraling floors
to the flowing geometry of its rotunda below,
then look back up at the domed glass ceiling,
you can imagine yourself inside
the whorls of a spiral, of a flower, ring
within ring of its evolving petals:
feel yourself reel.
ii.
Will the bed sway beneath me?
Will my eyes become the googly eyes of a puppet?
Will I survive a visit to the hair stylist,
am I able to lean my head back on the porcelain sink for a shampoo?
Winded, jittery tongued,
I write in short lines
so that my eyes don’t have
far to track.
iii.
These are the months of diagnoses:
atypical Meniere’s, Labyrinthitis,
a virus infecting my nervous system,
vestibular migraine.
I’m wary of doctors who say
you’ll be well in a few days, a few
weeks, a few months, sometimes
we don’t know…I’m sorry.
My wife has it, too.
iv.
(after Lauren Camp)
Color hurts my ears,
my thin skin permeable.
Amphibious, I seek sun,
then water, then a rock to lie down on.
For months, fatigue. A shadow of self.
Friends’ advice is cruel, not meaning to be.
I seek poetry
of wilder things:
spelunking, parasailing.
Nothing feels safe:
doctors, meds, missed
dinners. My doorknob hollows.
My mouth so tight my husband says
it’s disappearing down my throat.
v.
Don’t take your imagination
for granted. The brain can fuck up,
water fill in the gaps, aneurysm burst,
a stack of bills, a stack of books
unread, word-chipped China.
The doctor says, You have eighteen seconds to tell me your symptoms.
The teller asks, What story brings you here?
My husband offers a cup of tea.
The sieve of fine mesh, my brain,
spouts dishwasher,
instead of washing machine.
Says the thing that whooshes,
stray cats of words, ever present
exhaustion;
says amygdala, hippocampus,
cochlea, tiny hairs of forgiveness,
that swishing sound, that
weighted ball at the back
of my head.
Could MRIs show
the absence of creative language,
metaphor? Factor
in the changing climate,
new words gathering moss,
declining births,
mutations in bird song?
Dear Dr. N.
Words migrate into sentences where they do not belong.
Vertigo and I lie down knuckle to knuckle.
At the exhibit of Aborigine art,
pinpoints of color lit up. I joined them
on the painted feverish pathways of color.
It’s an ordinary life, except cars careen through me,
my body as translucent as a jelly fish.
One day I am nebula.
Another day, unlaced sneakers.
You recorded my words,
then I left.
I want to go back to that office
to edit my medical file.
I want you to know you hijacked my story.
Forget Aristotle, his neat construction:
beginning, middle, and end.
In my chaos narrative, the beginning
and ending collide in the middle,
the climax may occur at any time;
pages come unglued from their spine.
Claudia M. Reder, winner of the Bright Hill Press award for My Father & Miro, has published How to Disappear (winner of the Pinnacle and Feathered Quill awards) by Blue Light Press. She taught at California State University at Channel Islands for seventeen years and has now moved to Pittsburgh. Winner of the Charlotte Newberger Poetry Prize from Lilith Magazine, she is working on her next manuscript, MotherLoad.