Psychosis and Our Other Madnesses. A Pocket Aftershock from The Aftershock Review - Dr Anna Percy;Max Wallis;Max Wallis

'A JOLT TO THE MAINSTREAM'

- The Guardian, about Issue One

Psychosis and Our Other Madnesses gathers voices from wards, suburbs, peatlands, emergency rooms and private bedrooms to ask what we mean when we call something "mad." These poems do not romanticise breakdown, nor do they reduce it to diagnosis.

They sit inside it - in the closet with the policeman, in the psych unit with a dying phone, in the body that is both chokehold and longing. Across histories of insulin coma therapy and contemporary medication regimes, across queer desire, suburban paranoia, inherited violence and the pull of death itself, this anthology refuses a single story.

Madness here is not metaphor. It is political, erotic, ecological, medical, funny, humiliating and fierce.

There is no miracle cure in these pages. There is the body. There is memory. There is the system. There is the hum of a fan in a locked room. There is peat underfoot. There is the stubborn, uneasy fact of survival.

Edited by Dr Anna Percy who selected the poems and Max Wallis who helped shape the arc, Psychosis and Our Other Madnesses is a reckoning with how we speak about mental illness - and who gets to speak at all.