Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing. Eleni Stecopoulos. Nightboat Books, 2024. 432 Pages.

Eleni Stecopoulos’ Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing is a meditative experiment in “axial walking”—a deliberate integration of the body into environments of instability (108). The hybrid collection of lyric essays, fragments, and verse encounters and incorporates precarity. It enfolds precarity in its “hide of stars” (362), whilst remaining rooted in a core dream: “total immersion in feeling the world” (38). It maintains a tender, fierce adaptability in the face of complication, poison, and impasse. It treks and tumbles forth.

Throughout the book’s circular odyssey, Stecopoulos wields poetic logic as a lightning rod whilst weaving her cross-genre patchwork—illuminating the junctures of the poetic act and the healing act. Their commonalities, their pitfalls, their constant becomings. She does so with lucidity and generosity, as well as rigorous critique, sure to remain “clear-eyed about the violent ideologies embedded in discourses of healing” (5). Notably, in the experiments of both poetry and healing, there is a requirement for “unmaking of sense” (147), and by extension, for unmaking of self. This deliberate undoing fuels and engenders Stecopoulos’ primary intervention: to write healing “not as self-recovery but infinite extension to others” (4).

This infinite extension echoes formally in the work, as it both embodies and articulates meaningful geographies–figuratively and corporeally. Dreaming in the Fault Zone is composed of strands, or skeloi, translated as “the way many rivers flow into the same ocean” (40). Streams of ancient Greek myth (a culture to which Stecopoulos holds ancestral connections to), streams of indigenous healing practices, streams of literary history and psychoanalytic terminology, etymological lineages, facets and failures of modern medicine, personal experiences and anecdotal wisdoms. All coursing in the book’s central, albeit expansive, body.

In this tour de force, images travel. They burrow, churn, repeat, descend. They are “instruments” used for aiding dreamers (16). Stecopoulos tunnels through “the cave, the whirlpool, the snake pit” (38), uncovering what “beauty” and “terror” may be found in subterranean zones (144). Poetry, for Stecopoulos, is an instrument for “recovering psyche through myth and image” (41). Ever-moving strands, creatures, depths, nuclei. Throughout its travels, though, the book also sojourns at the “abaton”—a sacred ancient Greek site for sleeping, for receiving dreams. Where difficulty might be absorbed, formalized, and sacralized (24). Where body, psyche, and geography can, for a time, conflate.

Another useful image framework is Stecopoulos’ discussion of phlebes, the channels often translated as “veins” in the Hippocratic Corpus (164). Phlebes are not structures confirmed in the field of anatomy, but instead are “pathways deduced from living people’s response” (164). The intuitiveness of form in this work, moving organically between prose and poetry, seems to parallel the innate movement of blood vessels responding to bodily and environmental stimuli. Pathways forged to best facilitate, and encourage, lived response. Form as a vehicle for sensitivity. Form reverberating feeling.

As a reader, the sections of lyric feel like the distilled, sensory grout filling in the fault zones between Stecopoulos’ historical and critical deep-dives in prose. Poetry abides by a different logic; it “re-orchestrates the malady” (43). The lyric’s unique ability to reorganize impasse allows the work to break itself open. To hear itself within fissure, and enable emergent, floating truths. It articulates modalities of “non-verbal intelligence” (171). Importantly, though, poetry does not provide answers to impasse. Rather, poetry keeps one from ever being fully “fixed” or “recovered” —instead it keeps one in a constant state of “becoming,” dawning, in perpetual “incubation” (41). The only harmony to be found in poetry is in the ongoing balance of many trembling, tangled, co-constitutive relationships. Poetry, Stecopoulos argues, is chronic. It is chronicity:

“The chronic unsigns itself. Resigns from time. It says, I will not produce. I will not clock. I will notconsume the cure and become sick from the cure to consume another cure. I will not medicate myself to keep the public secret. I will not pass,” (355)

In parallel, “anyone who has long sought a cure knows there is no truth in healing” (247), Stecopoulos writes. Truth must remain unfixed as one inevitably comes and goes in “the land of pain” (8). It would be wrong to view healing, or poetry for that matter, in the terms of an absolute triumph or failure of an individual on a journey of self-transformation. This would be to “remain entranced by a peculiarly American enterprise” (8). Stecopoulos is mindful to never “fall for the lie of imperial time” in a culture that prefers “acute and limited” disease but rather argues for and writes into different principles completely (8). Pushing beyond success stories, beyond linearity altogether.

A crucial tool in combating the sharp segmentations and limitations of the West’s false notions of progress, with its set outcomes, is a porous, highly sensitive ongoingness. An acknowledgement of, and dedication to, chronicity, and of healing that is endlessly “complicated and often violent: experimental, rhetorical, magical, an effect or spectacle of time” (8). Qualities, of course, very akin to poetry itself. Never final, though still highly “empirical” (123). Disciplines of mystery; devotion to mystery.

In this essential unknowing, sensitivity is a key characteristic and implement for poets, for dreamers, and for those in states of chronic illness and/ or pain across the work. “Sensitivity is a method of reading, even if America calls it pathology,” Stecopoulos writes (101). For the author, this “exquisite” receptiveness contains traces of both inspiration and toxicity–crucially entangled with one another and giving rise to one another (99). It is impossible to grapple with any poetics of healing without also grappling with the poetics of “ sickness, violence, pain, and shame” (178). Stecopoulos proposes a vision for a poetry that knows part of its task is the taking of “odious language into its mouth, the way a doctor sucks out the poison to expel it” (178). The author makes a conscious choice in the curation of her own life and writing: “I decided I would not edit out my somatic conditions, but instead consider them valid as research” (168). This same notion becomes realized in verse:

“I will apply my syndrome,

everything running together,” (228)

Recognition of condition, and of chronic condition in particular, is also recognition of symptoms. Etymologically, “symptom” is “a falling-together or a falling-at-the-same-time, where inner and outer manifest each other” (15). Using the poet H.D. as an example, Stecopoulos argues for a poetics of symptom–“the art of composition by relation — aesthetic in every sense” (17). To read this book is to be educated in the poetic practice of attunement to one’s own symptoms. To gain a heightened awareness of one’s inner and outer conditions, where they intersect and what they produce, and for that to be a modality of being in the world. For acknowledging one’s own body, in illness and in healing, “as always having been strange” (170). Just as poetry is “language made strange… when language behaves most like itself, for language is already strange, other, made of infinite sounds and forms for infinite purposes” (143). Strangeness is our condition, as healing is, Stecopoulos poses, woven into our very fabrics. Art’s great power is its bewilderment. Running parallel, holding up a mirror, to the pure bewilderment of being cognizant in a body.

Coming upon the end of this lyric, critical work, I imagine myself as one of many kin “lying in a circle, in the immense ear of our interdependence” (234). This immense ear holds the “collective whisper and hum and clanging and crying” (354) that is being alive now. A funnel of listening, of attunement, that comes from one other, that comes from everywhere. Nestled in the ear, “we make ‘nothing’: art that is useless to power” (51). I am reminded of a self that may become possible in poetry, the “dissonance” arriving “prior to melody,” prompting one to become “many-limbed” and feeling, telling of this feeling, taking one another into “new unforeseen feeling” (361). There is no necessary causation that gives rise to the poem, and no necessary cure. Rather, there is simply the fact of its making.

“Devotion requires you to give up your charge to the collective” (241). The translation of the ache, the voice of the ache, the movement of the ache into its larger current. This is the dream of the poem, in its constant becoming.