"Over weeks, months, or years, exposure to increased secretion of stress hormones can result in allostatic load and its pathophysiologic consequences," explains Bruce S. McEwen*. "Pathophysiologic consequences," in Junie Désil's poetry, means the body's whole-systems breakdown. The Black, obese, medicated, financially-disadvantaged, overworked, pejorated, sexually-appropriated, and (don't be surprised) depressed poet increasingly sickens, as she seeks medical solutions that further burden her with the consequences of her racial profile.
"Cause," the prologue asks for; "origins." For this, Désil creates a poetics of the body whose lyricism flouts the outrage, and vice versa. The "valves to your life's chamber" are blocked from care. The "borderline hypertension" patient, enveloped in "clinical pallor," gasps in pain while the clinicians squeeze her into a chain of blood-pressure cuffs. The word "cuff" beats through the short prose-poem like a war-drum.
The woman bombarded with an avalanche of medical practices embodies a historical irony. In Désil's ancestral land of Haiti -- Ayiti -- the practice of Vodou priestesses mixed with the dominant colonizer-French religion, Catholicism. These priestesses, with military help, and using their human arts, effected the Haitian Liberation of 1804. But the rites performed on this poet fashion her as an inverted Vodou priestess: not liberating, but used; not active, but passive host for cancerous tentacles and "knife-tipped insults." Haiti passed from French domination to American, the island-nation disintegrating through the cultural and economic stress of competing business interests; the Ayiti of allostatic load is written in parallel on one of its outsourced female bodies.
The American influence disrupts the center of the book, where a shock centripetally casts the violence against Haitian women as a global system, a system networked in Désil's unique representation. As a reader, you don't recover from that shock, and you know you should not. Essential, though, is to read the poems in order; only then will the work's explosion occur in the context Désil painstakingly offers.
The day the poet feels too sick to work and "calls in Black" (sic) sets her on a new path, the "roar of salt and water … twinning the blood's rush" in her veins. While refusing easy solutions, she seeks a more manageable relationship with the guilt-stress she'd carried while working as a low-income housing official; guilt towards those marginalized in other ways than she, those for whom no one can afford to care enough.
As the poet reshapes her relational field, I recognize a struggle in my own. As a Jewish, white, disabled reader who's generally aware of Black oppression, I haven't needed to know Haiti's history. Reading allostatic load encourages me to investigate, experience; to take the time to care. And in caring to expose the silent and toxic stress of race-gender-disability discrimination (and white obliviousness, or worse), Junie Désil remedies it.
* New England Journal of Medicine, 15 Jan. 1998
— Ava Gregorian (MA English, MA Comparative Literature) is an intersectional poet and fiction-writer. She is currently Manuscript Developer on Victoria’s Island Writer Magazine. She has published in Zymergy and The Fiddlehead, and received Honourable Mention in The Brick’s 2014 literary contest. Her story, “Ecstatic,” is forthcoming in Island Writer Magazine.
You can read Ava Gregorian's story "Name in Lights" in Issue 308 (Summer 2026) Disability: The Revolution. Order the issue now:
Order Issue 308 (Summer 2026) Disability: The Revolution (Canadian Addresses)
Order Issue 308 (Summer 2026) Disability: The Revolution (International Addresses)
