Junie Désil, allostatic load

cancel Calm, and appslike Focus, Zen, and Freedom
the ones that liberatetime.
close all the two hundredand fifty-two open
tabs on my phone aboutself-care, mindbodygreen,
sourdough recipes,listicles, BuzzFeed, Bored Panda,
20 FACTS ABOUT MARLONBRANDO
and other articles like “HowI Stopped Working
for the Man and BroughtIn
over Six Figures a Month,”says the rosy-cheeked
french-manicured blondinfluencer. 

cancel all my health-typesubscriptions,
turn off all my notificationsand reminders
to drink water, to get upand stretch for thirty seconds,
to box breathe, cancelpreviously free now not-free pandemic
subscriptions during myshort-lived shelter-in-place
aspirations of knitting,breadmaking, preserve making,
guitar playing,indie-film watching. 

put on my noise-cancellingearphones
and actually – i want toso much –
rest.

Thesecond full-length collection by British Columbia poet Junie Désil, following eat salt │ gaze at the ocean (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2020) [see my review of such here], is allostatic load (Talonbooks, 2025), a collection titled aftera term coined by Bruce McEwen and Eliot Stellar in 1993, referring specificallyto the wear and tear on the body that accumulates as an individual is exposedto repeated or chronic stress. As the cover copy informs, the poems in this collectionnavigate “the racialized interplay of chronic wear and tear during tumultuousyears marked by global racial tensions, the commodification of care, and theburden of systematic injustice,” specifically one that seeks to “hold thevulnerability and resilience required to navigate deep healing in a world thatdoes not wish you well […].” Across detailed, intimate and meditative lyricstretches, Désil offers first-person explorations and exhaustions across thedifficulties of navigating not only her own particular wear, but a medicalsystem determined to undermine her experiences. As she writes as part of thepoem “in the doctor’s office,” near the opening of the collection: “when ilook at you / and people of your ethnicity // i would say youshould / start on Metformin. // scrawls on her notepad she /tells mehave a think.” Throughout, Désil attends the long line, the ongoingthought, one that extends within and between each poem, less a narrative than asweep, a suite, a flow.

at work when i log in
my emails number in thethree digits.
still. emerge from myfour-day
migraine 

and previous to that mytwo-week
vacation working-at-home-catching-up
staycation, and previousto that a number 

of breaks that have donenothing
to bring my stress orworkload down. i start
the twentieth to-do list 

that never gets shorter
and my heart begins itserratic
thumping.

Thereare echoes here of other medical-themed titles, titles that examine physicaland emotional vulnerabilities in fearless and revealing ways, whether Ottawawriter Christine McNair’s hybrid/memoir Toxemia (Toronto ON: Book*hugPress, 2024) [see my essay on such here], New York City poet Elizabeth T. Gray,Jr.’s After the Operation (New York NY: Four Way Books, 2025), Regina,Saskatchewan poet Tea Gerbeza’s How I Bend Into More (Windsor ON:Palimpsest Press, 2024) [see my review of such here] or Toronto poet ThereseEstacion’s Phantompains (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Désil’s allostatic load, alternately, also offers anadditional series of layerings, as the poem “on a particularly bad year-longstretch” affirms, writing: “of racial injustice, extrajudicial killings // workmicroaggressions / general climate of anti-Blackness // my body expropriated –pain / wouldn’t let me out of bed // my body—was this betrayal? or /affirmation[.]”

Setwith single-poem “prologue I” (“searching for indicators”) and three numbered section-clustersof poems—“allostatic load,” “weathering” and “medicine”—the first two sectionsholding a single-poem “prologue II” (“Coping Like John Henry”) between them,offering a suite of poems in slow build, a spread-out and accumulativedescription of stress, excess, medical complications and stressful interactionsbefore the eventual emergence into something that might provide salve. This collectionasks: What does care look like through such perpetual onslaught on the senses? Howmight care even be possible? “when the medical-office assistant ushers me down thehall,” begins “on my Nth visit to yet another medical professional,” “and asksme to get on the scale / it fails to tell her that the number reflects / thecares i neglect to dispense, / emails i forgot to dispatch – including the onessitting / rent-free in my brain, the owed return phone calls, / and textmessages, and emails, and to-dos, / and 252 open tabs, and / unfinished conversationssettling in my chest, / on my hips, in my thighs. i eat my feelings / becauseit’s unacceptable to have them, no that’s not / true. i portion control my emotionsand keep / my mouth busy so as not to earn the angry Black woman / badge.”

Aswell, I appreciate this mention of, this linkage to, Cecily Nicholson’s poetry title prior to this current one [see my review of such here], allowing aconversation between these two titles, connecting the narrator and experience ofone to the other, both poetry collections writing of and around colonialism andrace, and of finally attempting a sequence of grounding, sustainability and responsibility,through working their hands through the soil. As Désil writes as part of thethird and final section, “medicine”:

i read HARROWINGS whileoverturning soil on abandoned beds,
violently hacking theblackberries back, burning piles of thorny,
snake-thick vines. the blackberrybushes have invaded and
colonized the beds andthe surrounding soil, choking the male
kiwi tree – alsooverbrown, its branches braiding beautifully
as it drapes. slash throughthe uneasiness – on this soil that i
tell people is home – here.the three goats i’ve inherited browse
nearby on the blackberrybushes that we haven’t gotten to. later
they will sit contentedly,stare, regurgitate their earlier meal.