Adam Dickinson

As uninvited interlocutors, other creatures have long been writing their way into the metabolic conversations of human life. As vectors for various parasites and viruses, mosquitoes, for example, have exerted considerable pressure on human evolutionary and cultural history. They have killed approximately half of the humans who have ever lived, Timothy C. Winegard points out in his book detailing, among other things, the cascading connections between the mosquito and the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the transatlantic slave trade, the spread of Christianity, and the development of modern democracy. Beyond the consequential molecular inscriptions of an insect bite, however, how has the metabolism of other creatures informed conceptualizations and approaches to writing itself? How have writers worked with the metabolizing bodies of other creatures, inviting them to participate in imagining new forms of kinship and sustainable relationships with place and multispecies community?

Some of the most extreme acts of writing now being composed in the capitalist Anthropocene are being performed by petrochemicals. What does it look like to write in response to this writing? How do we “make oil a more conceptually powerful part of our knowing,” as Imre Szeman suggests must happen as part of any larger political activism?[1]

Anatomic is an attempt to think of writing in a more expanded way by incorporating the results of chemical and microbial testing on my body into poems that examine, through personal, biological, industrial, and cultural contexts, how the “outside” writes the “inside” in necessary and toxic ways. I offer my experiences working on this book as one perspective on some of the aesthetic, procedural, and formal concerns associated with this series of commentaries on metabolic poetics.

I got the idea to test myself for chemicals and microbes shortly after I had completed a book of poetry about plastics. While researching The Polymers, I became acquainted with endocrine disrupting chemicals (hormone mimics) and their relationship to plastic materials, cosmetics, and other common consumer products.

Oil is a form of writing. I know this because I can read it in my blood, urine, and shit. As part of research for a recent book, I tested myself for a wide range of chemicals. I also had my microbiome sequenced. I found petrochemical pollution in my blood and urine in the form of pesticides, flame retardants, phthalates, and more. I discovered evidence in my gut of shifted microbial communities associated with aspects of the Western diet. I wrote about what I found in a book called Anatomic, which I will discuss in more detail in the next post.