Pathemata Or, The Story of My Mouth

<p><b><i>It’s not the dream that matters, it’s the telling of the dream – the words you choose, the risks you take in externalising your mind</i></b><br><br>This is a dreamlike portrait of a body in struggle to connect with itself and others. As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer.<br><br>Merging dreams and dailies, <i>Pathemata </i>recounts the narrator’s tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss – the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life.<br><br>With characteristic precision, humour and compassion, Nelson explores the limits of language to describe experience, while also offering a portrait of an unnerving and isolating time in our shared history. A stunning, original experiment in interiority by the adored author of <i>Bluets </i>and <i>The Argonauts</i>, <i>Pathemata </i>is a personal and poetic reckoning with pain and loss, both physical and emotional, as well as an uncanny meditation on love, affliction and resilience.</p>