Spotlight series #116 : Katie Ebbitt

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.

STATEMENT

My work is interested in feminist experimental poetics and the confluence between poetry and healing. Poetry can expose the precise roots of an individual; a place where desire and suffering emerges together, where language can heal as much as it separates.

(Excerpt from “The Charnel House”)

Sometime ago, perhaps at the
very beginning, I went
through a door I couldn’t
go back through. Radical
femininity requires
everything of me. This
aesthetic violence. Trying to
write myself out of
a well. To write a
larger scene. For all
this talk about not
hitting women, I feel
quite bruised. The dirty
white page. How could
I even describe the color
of my skin? Underbelly
of a pig? I tilt my
head to see the paper
looked passed to the table
which enacted the
role of a mirror. This
amount of wake is like
death. No rain to expose a
shallowness. Nothing is gone
because nothing was
there. Dressed in white I
don’t sober up. This is the last
day. Scrawled. I fell
asleep. Obstreperous
playroom of a
child. Tiny. Based. My
body. Asymmetric
wreckage. Mixture of dead and
living things. Things that didn’t
ever exist. Never a renewed
source. Caul a next life. It never
began. Never began so how
to end. To end what didn’t
start. To end anticipation. To
end another life. Staggering like
a pregnancy
Each sentence is so
difficult to write. I started years
ago. Before the physical capacity to hold
a pen. Documentation in my
head. Thought about the details. Only
thought through feeling. To learn
to read was like choking. The feeling
was bad. The halt of it. Focus
impossible. Impossible. Impossible
when there is a choke of feeling. When
you’re forever on the brink of tears

Bump sternness. To
shrink. To be a cloud
atmospheric. To bloom from
a garden bed never intended
to bloom. I read these
items. Never meant
for them to be seen. I
feel badly for you having
noticed nothing. These pages
are bovine. Flame. Tongue. These
pages are air. Combustible. This
language a building block. Each
day is a new word

Katie Ebbitt is the author of the full-length collection, Fecund (Keith LLC, 2024) and chapbooks, ANOTHER LIFE (Counterpath, 2016), Para Ana (Inpatient, 2019), Air Sign (Creative Writing Department, 2024) and HYSTERICAL PREGNANCY (above/ground press, 2024). She resides in London.