Bøger af Rachel Economy

What happens when you ask the natural world to help you heal? As a child, Syd didn't know how to ask for help, but she did know how to talk to rabbits and squirrels, and how to listen to the rustle of the trees overhead - and in doing so, she would eventually lean deeply into those relationships to carve a path forward towards a full recovery from Bulimia (B).For Syd, B lived with her and in her body for close to three decades. Regardless what form B took during those years, it was a struggle for Syd to find space, agency and freedom - to have an identity separate from B. She struggled with knowing who she was, where she fit in (if anywhere at all), and how to define the desires (emotional, sexual, spiritual) that naturally moved through her body as she grew up. Nothing seemed to make sense - even the therapists and groups she sought out in later years seemed only to make things worse. As a queer, mixed race, gender queer being, Syd refused to give up on the belief (no matter how squished it became at times) that who she was, must matter. Because, she existed - her body existed. To accept these two things meant that somewhere and somehow, her full, unapologetic being-ness must therefore be divinely ordained. How to get to that knowing in her body, however, is where the rabbits and squirrels and trees came in. This is the story of Release: how a young child invited in a magical being who would help her survive a life of emotional abuse, excessive bullying, racism, homophobia and self-hate...and what it would take, close to 30 years later, to release that energy, the bulimia, completely from her life. This is not a self-help book. It is a journey into the mystical realms of recovery and through the veil between reality + illusion. This is a story that is told in moments, a spell cast between covers, a weaving together of memories that reach back centuries and dream forward into the unknown.Healing and recovery are not simple paths to walk...and when those paths are intricately connected to institutional and systemic oppression, finding the spaces to heal that honored the intersections of her multiple identities (queer, genderqueer, mixed race and living with mental illness) required Syd to seek out support in non-mainstream and spiritual spaces...ultimately leading to a complete and shame-free recovery from bulimia.

What happens if we imagine beyond the confines of what we are told is possible? This question runs through the hearts of the poems in Rachel Economy's The Origins of Streams. Glimmers of answers emerge in conversations and overlaps with animals, plants, the soil itself. The Origins of Streams invites the reader into sensory awakening as a human body within the bigger body of the world. Whether the topic is chronic illness, creation myths, heartbreak, or the ethics of big agribusiness, these poems queer and dissolve the (often artificial) separations placed between the human and non-human world. Love poems are populated with plants. Decomposition and the movement of matter become essential processes for reorganizing the world towards justice. Grief and loss offer richness and regrounding in ecological relationship between watersheds and human bodies. Food is a tapestry that grows and graces tables and words throughout. More than anything, these poems speak deeply to what being alive feels like, and what being alive could be. Moving from land-as-origin-story, through themes of dancing, apocalypse, animacy, and refuge, Rachel Economy immerses us in the body of now, and in the seeds of a fragmented and thriving future.