“I’m going to get you, my pretty!” The enigmatic Sick Witch lures the narrator on a metaphoric/literal vision quest through the hallucinatory terrain of undiagnosed and undiagnosable medical afflictions in poems that playfully explore connections between physical and mental illness. Compelling “fever dreams” tackle disorders, from allergy to somnambulism, from retinal detachment to schizophrenia, from avian flu to ALS, beyond the insular country of the sickbed. Allusion becomes illusion in the blink of an eye, both in the sharp images and also with insight, revelation, confusion and fear — with a supposed control that advances then recedes, then does it again and again. Here are tales both grim and Grimm, complemented by “lessons” from other patients, and leavened through a series of Letters to an Insurance Adjuster, who may or may not be a good wizard. Disquieting images from myth and pop culture compel the reader to join in the dance down the yellow brick road. X may mark the spot, but is it malignant? Or does it lead to Health?

Crystal Hurdle was born in Zwiebrucken, Germany and grew up in Ottawa, Ontario and Victoria, British Columbia, where she obtained a BA and MA in English. Since 1985 she has been teaching Creative Writing and English Literature and Composition at Capilano College in North Vancouver. Her poetry has been widely published in Canadian journals, including Canadian Literature, The Dalhousie Review and The Capilano Review. As a featured speaker, she read a number of her Plath/:Hughes poems as the international Plath Symposium at the University of Indiana in the fall of 2002. With her husband she presently makes her home in North Vancouver, BC.

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