Pain Studies

In this extended lyric essay, a poet mines her lifelong experience with migraines to deliver a marvelously idiosyncratic cultural history of pain-how we experience, express, treat, and mistreat it. Her sources range from the trial of Joan of Arc to the essays of Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry to Hugh Laurie's portrayal of Gregory House on House M.D. As she engages with science, philosophy, visua...