Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic

Sarah James
(Verve Poetry Press, 2022); pbk, £10.99

Thoughtful and haunted, Sarah James’s recent poetry collection, Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic was shortlisted for the International Rubery Book Award 2023. It is a playful, biting, and introspective look at life with type one diabetes. James’ skilfully employs both conventional and experimental styles, with page layout and lineation playing as large a part in the conveying of meaning as words. I would say the style is reactive, this much is clear from the very beginning with the opening poem ‘Diagnosis’ with its short, irregular-lined stanzas which suggest memory, and the fragmented piecing together of a significant but not wholly realised moment. Or with ‘Not Quite a Changeling’, with the structure of several 3-line stanza ending on an emphatic single-line stanza.

All my life I’ve been drowning
in air. My first gasp was gill-like –
 a fish writing without sea.

Every day, I was off her scales;
my soaped cells fall back towards water,
brine, the stifled cry that faltered,

open-mouthed, before mine.

The contrast here between the single and three-lined stanzas conveys a feeling of gasping for air,  a recurring motif and theme throughout the collection, and it often accompanies reflections of the speaker’s relationship with their sister. In this poem the speaker connects their feelings of drowning and breathlessness with their being born from their sister’s “water-logged lungs”. It is one of many physical reminders for the speaker, with the sister’s presence acknowledged in the speaker’s breath, skin and bones.

Certain words recall particular ideas or events through the collection. Structure is also used to recall what occurred before, for example the form of ‘When the Changeling Grows Up’, resembles that of an earlier poem: ‘Advice from my [dead] sister’. This self-reference highlights connection and growth, particularly its word choice and the use of italics – used previously to convey sister’s voice – thus again reaffirming the sister’s presence.

Among the many things that this collection deals with  is the development of identity, altogether multifaceted and unabashed. The titular poem reflects how identity is represented in the book, but the poem ‘Blood Sugar Sex Magic’ lacks the commas seen in the title. This difference implies the collection as a list of these three things, whereas the poem combines all in one, which I see as an indication that the speaker’s different experiences are whole and built into that moment. Structure is also fundamental to this enmeshment of components of identity, and it also speaks to James’ more playful style of expression. The poem begins with regular two-line stanzas, but the structure dissolves and looks architecturally airy, becoming scenery of sorts, reminiscent of the incense said to be burning by the speaker.

Faster       louder than the room
                scent            music            blood pulses

entwining  touch                                          bodies
                kiss[.]

Life with diabetes is represented as important to the speaker’s life but it is not limited to the experience of diabetes. This is addressed throughout the collection, but especially with ‘Diabetes’ ^unwell of Night Hypos’. The personification of the illness – done through the apostrophe at the end of the word ‘diabetes’ –  sets a boundary between the speaker and her illness  with diabetes personified as a lurking monster that closely follows the speaker.

Life with diabetes is treated as hurtful and at the same time as regular as breathing. In poems specifically about experience with Type 1 Diabetes (insulin dependent), many objects and images recur, with the repetition reflecting a stasis and mundanity of the experience, an idea which is encapsulated by the following lines on just how ingrained the injections are to the speaker’s everyday:

it’s other daily stabs as invisible
As genetics[.]

The routine of living with an illness is made even more ordinary by the more fantastical elements of the collection. These elements appear in the personification of objects and nature, for example  poems ‘Holidaying’ and ‘Balancing on a Swinging Hammock’  delve into themes of freedom, with being outdoors and amongst nature providing an escape of sorts from the constraints of everyday life.

Shannon O’Donnell