Ovarium

Poems

Joanna Ingham

• Publisher: The Emma Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781915628053
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Tender, loving and visceral, Ovarium is a pamphlet of poems about a giant ovarian cyst. The poet charts her journey with the cyst, from diagnosis to surgery to recovery, via a landscape of scanner rooms and hospital wards. The poems explore the impact of illness, and the body as a site of disgust and shame but also healing and endurance. Ingham's poems are forensic as she looks at the disorientating and sometimes patriarchal language of anatomy and medicine, and the way illness can change the relationship we have with our own bodies. I tried to think of you as fruit, growing
against the sun-warm wall of my gut. Melon-headed, you nudged the leafy organs,
dug out a place for yourself in the plot. I never guessed. I was only bloody earth
to you, a coldframe full of light.
- from 'Cyst'

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Ovarium
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Cyst
• A&E
• MRI
• Results will be with you as soon as possible
• Scan
• Thirteen ways of looking at an ovary
• The anaesthetist tells me to be a shrimp
• How to sleep
• Ovariotomy for large cystoadenoma ovarii
• Bay 1, Elizabeth Ward
• Dear Gabriele Falloppio
• After the op
• The discharge nurse tells me no hanky-panky for at least six weeks
• To my belly
• Nuclear medicine scan
• The mother of ovariotomy
• Our Lady of the Ovary
• Advanced sharks have only a single ovary
• Elegy for an ovary
• Note
• About the Emma Press