Chronic Women

LoveReading Says

Underpinned by the need to transform a patriarchal healthcare system into something that serves women justice, Chronic Women features enlightening, courageous works by female poets of Wales. Edited by Hanan Issa and Gwyneth Lewis, the ground-breaking bilingual book was born of an ambitious and equally as ground-breaking project that “set out to build a wider understanding of women’s health conditions, support the work being done to address inequalities in health care and outcomes for women and explore the role that poetry and creative writing can have in supporting women and girls living with health conditions”, with copies having been distributed in Welsh healthcare settings. 

Curated by theme (The Body, Crisis, Living with Pain, Mental Health Conditions, and Healing), each poet shares experiences that all-too often go unheard and unseen, from movingly honest accounts of loneliness and trauma, and the trials of negotiating NHS Wheelchair Services, to life-inhibiting anxiety and depression. 

As such, Chronic Women is an edifying must-read for feminists, literature lovers with a keen sense of social justice, those living with pain and chronic health conditions, and their loved ones. It also demonstrates the power of poetry. On that subject, I’ll leave the last words to the editors: “Chronic Women/Menywod Cronig is more than a collection of poems. It is an act of testimony, a call to awareness, and, in many ways, a rallying cry”.

Joanne Owen

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