Inhabiting Duration

Abstract

In examining poetry about chronic illness from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the article investigates how poets assess and complicate the durations that mark illness. Within the technology-studded healthcare spaces of the 1990s and 2000s, these poems navigate the various scales and technological feats at the forefront of their treatment: the visibility of cancerous cells on an image, the transplantation of an organ, or the amputation of a breast. Although medical technology helps these writers initially traverse the alternative temporalities and scales to which illness draws attention, the poems ultimately move outside of the healthcare realm, instead engaging with environmental spaces. In so doing, these poems come to rely on the expansive timeframes of large-form ecological scale to represent the experience of chronic illness.