Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing

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.

Eleni Stecopoulos is a writer and poet living in the San Francisco Bay Area, with roots in New York City and Greece. She is the author of a poetry collection, Armies of Compassion (2010), and a work of literary nonfiction and criticism, Visceral Poetics (2012), which Alphonso Lingis wrote ＂open[s] an important field for investigation and practice: the healing force of language, of poetry＂, and Petra Kuppers called ＂a thick rich book of Artaudian trickster moves.＂ She has taught literature and writing at Bard College, the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, and in community workshops.