Pantoum Stress Disorder by MNJames

About the book: Pantoum Stress Disorder explores the pantoum as a material metaphor for trauma, and how they both repeat themselves whether you like it not. Exploring her history with sexual and relationship violence, drug use, and other mental health woes, MNJames seeks something close to closure in her debut chapbook.

About the author: MNJames (All Pronouns) is a concrete poet and editor of FATHERFATHER MAGAZINE. Their work has appeared in ANMLY, Thimble, Word For/Word, Sinister Wisdom, and TIMBER. When not in the literary sphere, she likes scrubbing out of Magic: The Gathering tournaments and teaching chess to elementary schoolers. They were born in Hastings, England and raised in San Jose, California. He is an MFA student at Virginia Tech.

"MNJames's Pantoum Stress Disorder explores trauma in a unique way, taking full advantage of the pantoum form's musicality and versatility. The poems open with lines like 'Ponder the hitachi magic wand / so you, too, can experience the world / conceptually.' and 'and the goth was crying / for the first time since Abilify' to set a playful stage, only for MNJames to use the intricate pantoum—line repetition mimicking the repetitive feelings that come with waves of traumatic memory—to devastate us. At the end of each poem, we're left dazzled by MNJames's language and knocked-out by their relatably chaotic recollections—'and I felt high. Or was it demise?'" —Veronica Bennett, founder & e.i.c. of Bullshit Lit

"how many times are you willing to travel through your memories until they change? what do you do when they break to foam as they hit water, and you’re still left with the lingering instead of the lack? Pantoum Stress Disorder by MNJames is a fine execution of trauma as repetition that crunches through time itself and back again when the systems that be try to imbue us with their error. the poems are mastered and texturized by language and the boundaries beyond with the switching of letters, or a rearrangement of phrases, much like the hopeful and deliberate alteration of memories." —tommy wyatt blake, author of Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen (fifth wheel press); TASEREDGED (watch out!) (Querencia Press); So, Who’s Courage? (Bullshit Lit)

Release date: July 25, 2023