Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing

Sure to alter the terms by which we understand illness and health, Eleni Stecopoulos’s deeply original meditation is an aesthetic experience and an education. Composed of lines of flight and incantations, learned excavations, and critiques of cure, Dreaming in the Fault Zone introduces a wholly new language by which to understand illegible pain. Stecopoulos’s insights on inflammatory response; (hyper)sensitivity; and cruelty in the form of care, should be required reading. This book’s radical incursion is irresistible; its uncommon instruction a new ground from which to start.

Committed to forms that equate a body, foreign to itself in affliction, and the sound of words estranged in poetry, these essays brim with great intellectual audacity. Stecopoulos choreographs a profound reimagining of modernism’s fateful legacies in a command performance of the poetic function and with a compassion borne of all that an impasse proliferates. Here are new scores from an alternate archive of critical repair that views symptom and method, malady and care, now as bricolage and ritual, now as empathy’s “experiment wrought from struggle.” Along a horizon line of shared purpose—“the medicine of relationships that require translation”—Dreaming in the Fault Zone touches the ailing imagination while it reaches for the stars: an exhilarating work of poetics.

A major meditation on a complex, labyrinthine topic, told from within the labyrinth. In Dreaming in the Fault Zone, Stecopoulos shows us that healing can never be reduced to a biomedical model, being always entangled in aesthetics, in varied and collective practices of the body, in the medicine of the word. Stecopoulos’s writing here is as powerful as in her Visceral Poetics—and her thinking flourishes on this difficult but lush terrain.

Reading Dreaming in the Fault Zone, I feel like I am being guided through a planetarium on the dome of which is projected—and is constantly revolving/resolving—the human body, through the skin and cells of which a multitude of voices is shining a history and intelligence that is being listened and sensitized into a poetry, and that all of this is happening, miraculously and necessarily, inside the body. I am grateful to Eleni Stecopoulos for having written—having lived—herself and all of us into such an iridescent work, “dreaming in the impasse.”

Stecopoulos conjures a spell in which language itself, an expression of body and earth, constitutes a healing pivot. Far from the toxic polemics that propose to explain a frozen world, Dreaming in the Fault Zone is a haunting, sometimes soothing, sometimes unsettling, nighttime companion—a murmuring midnight echo from a strange new upside-down world that was here all along.

Dreaming in the Fault Zone is a visionary work of profound compassion. Here is a poet unafraid of difficulty, of beauty, of the complex realities of our devastating world. And here is a poet who offers up her love of language, collectivity, the earth itself as she makes space for rest, solace, hope, dreaming and sensing in this experimental, choral, and utterly astonishing book. Stecopoulos kindles a dream of relation, where we stand in for each other, accompany each other, translate each other, honoring our vivid particularities and irreducible differences. I read this book with awe.

Among the many spaces and places of healing explored in this encyclopedic book, Eleni Stecopoulos describes the old temple where people, manifestly ailing or not, were invited in to rest and sleep and dream, and in that dreaming find the recipe for their own cure. This book is that temple.

It is when a body is placed in the shadows of pain, and time is subject to the chronic clock, that some of the essential challenges of writing are flushed out. We have them set out before us in Eleni Stecopoulos’s apophatic work: “There is no cure, and this is community.”