Posthumously published at the opening of 2020, Teva Harrison’s collection
Not One of These Poems Is About You documents her experience of her last years of life before she passed away from metastatic breast cancer. She opens the collection with “A Pocketful of Stones”: “I’d like to close the distance between us: where you end, where I begin, / but your skin stops me, I can’t find my way in.” Harrison keeps her reader in a space of closeness and intimacy through her loose rhymes and clear language.
Harrison does not shy away from difficult feelings of self-punishment, resentment, and alienation. She writes in “The Things I Do to Keep Cancer on the Down-Low”: “I’m biting my tongue because this is what I do when you tell me how / nobody would get that I’m dying. / As if the guessing is what matters, not the dying.” As she grimly relates attempts to minimize her illness, she toes the line between wanting her illness to be recognized, to be seen as “sick,�
In-Between Days
Nadia Siu Van
By recounting the unresolved hurt of her past, and facing the uncertainty of her future, Harrison who was diagnosed with advanced metastatic breast cancer in 2013 has found one way to reclaim power from the “bogeyman” that is her illness.
“It’s the unspoken that is most frightening,” writes Teva Harrison in the preface to her deeply personal graphic memoir,
In-Between Days. By recounting the unresolved hurt of her past, and facing the uncertainty of her future, Harrison who was diagnosed with advanced metastatic breast cancer in 2013 has found one way to reclaim power from the “bogeyman” that is her illness.
Anthology from PSU Press Graphic Medicine series combats social stigma Menopause: A Comic Treatment is a New York Times Best Graphic Novel of 2020
December 11, 2020
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. The critics of the New York Times Book Review have included Menopause: A Comic Treatment on their year-end list of the best graphic novels of 2020. Edited by MK Czerwiec and featuring contributions from Lynda Barry, Leslie Ewing, Joyce Farmer, Ellen Forney, Teva Harrison, Ajuan Mance, Mimi Pond, and many others, Menopause was released in August 2020 as part of Penn State University Press’s Graphic Medicine series.
IMAGE: Penn State
The collection of short comics unapologetically depicts the condition and all its attendant symptoms in order to combat social stigma and empower those undergoing menopause.