The Problem with Having a Body unites Jessica Popeski's preoccupations with intersectional ecofeminist poetics and the genetic inheritance of fractured, grandmaternal generational lines. It examines how political and geographical rupture, war zones, and genocide generate traumatic, ancestral memory by chronicling the speaker's experiences of moving through the world with physical dis/abilities and anorexia. These poems ask loud questions about why depression has decorated the medical notes of the author's family, manifesting as cyclical bouts of anxiety and depression, physical illness, voicelessness, and disordered eating. By granting these recurring intergenerational cadences value in the present, the collection seeks to transform a legacy of depression into greater consciousness.

Jessica Popeski's profile page

Jessica Popeski is a dis/abled opera singer, Professor of English, Creative Writing, and Music, and internationally published, intersectional ecofeminist poet. Her work has been published in Acta Victoria, carte blanche, The Irish Literary Review, Leaf Press, Room, The Nervous Breakdown, The Windsor Review, Hart House Review, Write Where We Are Now, Riddle Fence, The Woven Tale Press, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of multiple scholarships and awards, was named one of Tkaronto/Toronto's “exceptional up and coming writers? by Open Book, and was invited to a T? Newydd Writing Centre residency to study under the tutelage of the National Poet of Wales, and the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, and authored chapbooks “Oratorio? and “The Wrong Place? with Anstruther Press. Her operatic accolades include principal roles with the Brandon University Opera Ensemble, and the Sheffield Crucible Theatre's Music in the Round, and she toured across Europe with internationally award-winning choir, Cantores Novae. She was raised, for the most part, in Moscow, Russia, and Sheffield, England, by her mother and grandmother, and is a Professor at Seneca College, George Brown College, and Humber College.