cells, fully differentiated *PREORDER*
by Kinsey Cantrell
$18.00
Synopsis
Winner of the 2023 Noemi Press Book Award
What does it mean to differentiate—to diagnose, to be diagnosed, to have a diagnosis?
cells, fully differentiated is an account of non-diagnosis, an experiment in mining memory and parsing trauma in an ultimately failed attempt to construct narrative. Against a backdrop of social and economic precarity, the narrator’s effort to understand becomes cyclical. Fully differentiated cells are cells that have been defined, cells that have an explicit role in the functioning of the human body. If understanding and diagnosis are in service of the larger structures of capitalism, then ultimately cells, fully differentiated rejects that understanding.
Blurbs
“Kinsey Cantrell’s brave, brilliant book cells, fully differentiated is a lesson in how to live when nothing works, not even the body. When you’re chronically ill, the usual means of survival are strained: wages, credit, even love relationships. Tests, pills, insurance claims, sweat, bruises aggregate to create a medicalized entity, equally corporeal and corporate. The individual with illness becomes a data set, pinned down and gridded out like Cantrell’s sectioned, fragmented poems. But illness is not a problem solved at the individual level. As Cantrell says, ‘if self-actualization is the goal, it’s a terrible goal.’ So the tender, broken, searing voice of these poems seeks instead to breach the cellular boundary, to care and be cared for, to push past the grid while we still live here, to make it work.”
Catherine Wagner
author of "Of Course"
“Kinsey Cantrell’s cells, fully differentiated is at once deeply felt and deeply intelligent, giving us a mind wrestling with the ramifications of the body’s illness like Jacob with his proverbial angel. Cantrell works the page like a scientist, a dancer, and a latter-day Pollock, and takes us through cell maturity and cell death, looping uncertainty and longing, capitalistic medicine and its own pathologies, with a speaker who wants ultimately the simplest of things: ‘what i want is not impact / but velocity / waking up to you with morning.’”
Sarah Thankam Mathews
author of "All This Could Be Different"
“‘Everything is short-lived,’ Kinsey Cantrell notes in her rending, beautiful cells, fully differentiated. Here, against the ‘reek of sheets,’ we have a series of circles, cycles, and cumulations, a resistance to pathologization and to capital itself. These formally inventive, heartbreaking, but never fragile poems live in the space between unknowingness and kinship, asserting a sick life powerful in its resistance to work and to working alike. Instead of either, there’s just the work of the book—anxiety loops, reiterative symptoms, and endless pushbacks to doctors and other authority figures. It isn’t a dismissal of the intensity of the work to say it gave me life. As she repeats throughout the collection, ‘there are so many of us,’ after all.”
Zefyr Lisowski
author of "Girl Work"
