Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing - Paperback

by Eleni Stecopoulos (Author)

FINALIST FOR THE 2025 PEGASUS AWARD FOR POETRY CRITICISM

A virtuosic inquiry into the forms and uses of healing, from ancient and modern medicine to contemporary literature, ecology, and protest.

In the era of the "chronic acute" long predating COVID-19, Eleni Stecopoulos set out to investigate the imagination, aesthetics, and ideology of healing--its mysteries and mystifications, its many channels and codes. Fusing lyric inquiry with cultural criticism, Dreaming in the Fault Zone explores art's treatment of our conditions at a time of both increased cynicism about healing and longing for it. Stecopoulos talks to physicians, poets, psychotherapists, disability activists, ethnographers, spiritual seekers; curates performances and takes part in community rituals; documents pilgrimages and visits therapeutic landscapes. Whether writing about the poet H.D.'s psychoanalysis with Freud or madness and apartheid in Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power, the salve of demagogues or a global alliance of people with contested illnesses, Stecopoulos confronts the poetics and politics of affliction, empathy, memory, and survival. Weaving together esoteric scenes and everyday practice, with flashes of humor, these essays travel in a space of impasse and unending experiment.

Author Biography

Eleni Stecopoulos is a poet, essayist, and critic. She is the author of Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing (2024). Her other books include Visceral Poetics (2016), a hybrid of criticism and memoir that Petra Kuppers called "a thick rich book of Artaudian trickster moves"; and Armies of Compassion (2010), a collection of poems that Anne Waldman called "riveting . . . rare beauties." Stecopoulos's writing has appeared in Pamenar Magazine, [φρμκ], Best American Experimental Writing, Open Space (SFMOMA), In Insomnia: An Anthology, Somatic Engagement: The Politics and Publics of Embodiment, ecopoetics, Viz. Inter-Arts, Second Stutter, The Capilano Review, Harvard Review, and many other venues. She taught at Bard College and the University of San Francisco and now works with writers as an independent editor, manuscript consultant, and mentor. From New York, she lives in Northern California.