If you have ever experienced your mind as matter, as a ball of live wire that burrows through Reality and brings you toward the “Edge of Death.” If you’ve ever tried to beat your doctor in a game of “catch the crazy” (he keeps his face hidden behind the clipboard, checking little boxes next to your name). If you know that experiencing the “Edge of Death” inevitably leads to the “Edge of Legibility” (the doctor puts his pen down and stops taking notes when you start speaking in metaphor about the hot buzz behind your eyes). If you have sat on the curb outside an Applebee’s late at night while your friend on the other end of the phone describes a feeling she can’t quite explain, she doesn’t know why this is, but can you stay on the phone? If your stomach does a tiny somersault when someone says she’s like, you know – crazy, and a part of you goes to sit by itself in the next room, then go wrap them in a blanket and bring them Odes to Lithium. It’ll remind that part of you that there are others “speaking into the room until the whole world is our room.”

Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium is an assemblage of poems dedicated to Lithium, a drug prescribed to treat bipolar disorder. The collection weaves together various poetic forms, including striking ink drawings by the author that explore the winding path of living with mental illness. It takes you through the triumphs, the heartbreaks, the terrors, the uncertainties, the moments of reprieve, and the moments of resounding joy — showing that wholeness is when everything is allowed to be in the room. That, yes, this too belongs. Odes to Lithium offers what is often not extended to living with mental illness: compassion, understanding, and the ability to contend with complexity and nuance. 

Though the collection is filled with moments of gratitude to Lithium, it is also a relationship that can feel bittersweet, at odds with joy, a relationship made complicated by the drug’s long list of side effects:

coma,

            blurred vision,

                                    startled response

blackout spells  tinnitus   hallucinations

tics   taste distortion   worsening

of organic brain syndrome   dry mouth

fatigue, fever  hyperirritability   salty taste

swollen lips   tightness in chest    eventual

blindness   incontinence   hyperthyroidism

And yet, despite this, the speaker is allowed a life:

I make a plan for tomorrow, I make a plan

for tomorrow, I make a plan for tomorrow

run the shower hotter

roll the frozen globe of a grape

from roof to cheek

Little God that I

am

***

I was 31 years old when my father sat with me in the driveway of my apartment, his hand on his chest, showing me how to breathe into the lower part of my stomach. It was early July. The birds that afternoon were loud, flocking the viburnum bushes on the edge of my driveway. My father had made the two-hour drive from Southeast New Hampshire in an hour and a half after picking up the phone, me on the other end, mumbling something about needing to go to the hospital. As we sat cross-legged next to my truck, my cat lay sprawled on the pavement, her black fur shiny and hot.

Try it, my father said, try breathing like this. But my phone call earlier was me trying to tell him this was no longer working. The therapy, the meditations, the weighted blankets, the herbal supplements, even the Ativan that my doctor had prescribed me for flight anxiety couldn’t take the edge off, couldn’t cut through the film of terror that had settled over my life — an unsettling torment I had never thought possible. For months, I had felt as if an emergency exit door had been opened mid-flight, and suddenly, it felt like my entire body was slipping through a tiny hole into oblivion. I had been stranded in the most terrifying recesses of my brain, and love had left the room.

In “On This End,” the speaker contends with the breakdown of communication that those living with mental illness often experience with those closest to us. A letter correspondence broken and flipped, what gets lost, and how messages are received. The struggles of communicating across what can feel like an impassable gulf:

Love Mom                              communicate with me                        find some way to

I hope that you will         my predicament          consider my feelings and

            please              I ask you to                 a lost child

***

Erlichman explores the struggle to describe an experience that is hard to inhabit and even harder to put words to. Communicating the experience of mental illness requires another dimension, a movement beyond the usual X and Y axis, beyond linearity, something that Erlichman achieves through language that extends beyond time and space:

Four days of nurses with minuscule paper cups

of experimental doses.

Four days in which “I’m sorry” is like a bird

thrashing against your window

In the hours before my father came, I had been sitting on my couch, pressing my sweaty palms to my thighs, trying to hold my world together. I had finally called to tell him that I was not okay. For weeks, I had been writing notes on scraps of junk mail that said you are not dying, leaving them thumb-tacked to my walls, the holes in the plaster widening, less and less able to hold the thumb tacks in place. No amount of positive self-talk could distract me from the gulf of terror widening in the back of my head. When I tried to explain to my father what was happening, I had no words. I wish, at the time, I had a copy of Odes to Lithium so that I could instead simply point to page 58, to “Postscript o Mania,” where Erlichman puts to words what I could not:

At what precise moment

did my brain tattle on itself? Everything

was a wick. Even God was worn down

by my false sirening. It’s not easy dying

without dying.

A common cultural misconception of mental illness is that this is due to a personal failure, weakness, or an inability to keep it together, a point that Erlichman contends with throughout the collection:

I’m ill

what they hear:

I’m ill

legitimate

I broke the

I

The speaker in Erlichman’s “Pink Noise,” however, realizes otherwise:

last night in an unprecedented turn of events

I held my suffering to my ear & heard.

the brain broke itself

the brain broke itself

            rather than

I broke the brain

I broke the

I broke

I

On the phone with my friend, crouched in the trees outside of an administration building on campus a few weeks into my graduate program, I remember how, for the first time in months, I noticed the sun, the way it hit the sides of the building, the way bricks glowed a warm red, my tiny arm hairs shining gold. I could feel my blood beginning to warm from its touch. One week prior, I had started medication, realizing that despite my efforts, there was no way I could pull myself out of this canyon. There in the trees, I could feel the drug beginning to hold me, allowing me a sense of peace that I was convinced I would never see again.

In “Lightweight,” Erlichman describes a similar experience:

 At the party I’m called a lightweight

while you shovel salt through my blood

like a dedicated father clearing the driveway

except the driveway is the whole world

you make wine take off its clothes faster

glaze my eyes with gentle & I deserve a life-

time supply of this ease   so when they

tease “just one drink & you’re good”

they don’t know     it’s not the wine

somebody cares for me

I first read “Lightweight” standing in the hallway of my apartment complex, just having pulled Odes to Lithium out of the manilla envelope wedged into my mailbox. I remember how the last line hit as I exclaimed yes, that’s it! in the hallway, not caring who heard me. When I pulled the blister pack of medication out of my cupboard the next morning, I repeated the line to myself out loud — somebody cares for me. Later, in “Potion,” Erlichman describes her first experience taking Lithium: “This is not a metaphor. When I looked up, I saw the sun.”

In her book The Collected Schizophrenias, Esme Weijun Wang describes her experience living with mental illness. She comments on the cultural misconception that those with mental illness “cannot be trusted about anything, including our own experiences.” In Odes to Lithium, the speaker exhibits certainty in her experience. A certainty that gives and makes room for those who share similar experiences. In “I’m Sitting With Bjork in My Bathtub” the speaker is unafraid of metaphor:

she slides my mental hospital evaluation papers into the

water, so they dissipate into tiny paper fish. this is her

song. I am a mossy stone remembering its past life as a

bird. she names every doctor who has never met my eye. it is

not political, it is a curse

The images in this poem are not explained, prefaced, or guided by a framing narrative. They are left as they are. I am left to wonder if this experience is real or metaphorical. Those who live with mental illness know the permeability of reality, that it is not a given, not immovable, not made of concrete certainty. Instead, what matters is the reality of one's experience and that yes, sometimes Bjork really is sitting with you in the bathtub.

In this way, the whole book is an answer to the doctor’s dismissal in the first poem:

‘Do you really think there are snakes in your arms?’

***

I found Odes to Lithium months after coming out of this episode. For weeks, I took it with me everywhere I went, the book a constant reassurance from a friend — I believe you. In the final line of her acknowledgments, Erlichman writes: “Finally, to the mentally ill. This book is most especially, undoubtedly, and gratefully for you. May we keep speaking ourselves into the room until the whole room is our room.” Odes to Lithium is one of the snow shovelers who keep my driveway clear, an eternal arm around my shoulder, a reminder to let go of the idea of normal, and a balm for when shame creeps in. It reminds me of the life given and the space created by the relationships, love, and medication that keep me afloat:

What a blessing, my monk,

to be your fire