Book Review: Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman

I'm One of Us

By Mari Pack

Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium (Alice James Books) comes out September 2019. I’ve been waiting for it for years. ​
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I was diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder in June 2016. This was after I’d move to New York without a job. Signed a lease with a man I’d met on a server. Gotten a tattoo in Chinatown and shaved off half my hair. After I’d cried under my bed repeating the word “monster.”After my best friend stopped talking to me. After I stood on the J train platform. Watching it come. As if all light had been sucked out of the sky with a vacuum. Hovering with the idea of throwing my body in front of it. 

I heard Shira Erlichman perform some of her 730 odes to lithium – a reference to when she takes the pill, 7:30 twice a day – at the New York City Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island in July of that year. I was lying in the grass with a friend who braided what was left of my hair. My broken brain was learning to rewire itself with mood stabilizers and anti-depressants. It felt like I had done something wrong – ruined my life. My social worker had recommended I pursue an “aspirational” project to bring myself back to focus. I was writing down poems. 

Erlichman explains in her poem, “Pink Noise”— which she read on that July day in 2016 – that “in Spanish and Japanese the agent / of causality / is dropped, as in: “the vase broke itself,” rather than “John broke the vase.”” Thus, “I broke the brain” can become “the brain broke itself.” So while a dose of lithium –“from the Greek dosis, meaning gift” – can settle, even heal a broken brain, the breaking itself is faultless. “Pink Noise” ends with “after a show an audience member says to me “I just / wanted to introduce myself, I’m one of us.””

I’m one of us. 
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How is it that becoming part of a community makes everything better? Erlichman didn’t know it at the time, but she and I were both “one of us.” And her work hit me through the heartstream. It was as if – as reads her poem “Beatrice” – I pulled “a flower / from her skull & / weave[d] it into mine.”  

Odes to Lithium is a selection of some of these 730 odes — and it’s glorious. From hallucinations to hospitalization to her first prescriptions (“the bad medicine”) to lithium (“Every morning and every / night I swallow your bitterness”) and living on her friend’s couch after “hospitaljail,” Odes traverses a landscape that is earnest, electric and hopeful. It is a lovesong to the drug that saved Erlichman from the “Cliff.” 

It wasn’t easy.  “You kiss me awake & tuck me in,” she writes of lithium in “Unrequited Teacher.” “Instead of Darling, you whisper Mortal.” Lithium comes with a long list of side effects, from having to pee to memory loss and blurred vision. Erlichman tries several times to reduce it, “wanting to be “natural” – / tea tree milk, sprouted / cashews, bark deodorant/ “natural” only to be “lost in the snow.” In one of my favorite poems, “There Were Others,” Erlichman confesses to lithium that “When the SSRIs asked me to dance, I danced.” But they gave her years of her life back. “She “read books […] cooked meals.” She lived. 

Living is the thing. Difficult. Messy. Complicated. Harder for people with our illness. Impossible for Erlichman without lithium. Impossible too, I reckon, without poetry. 

You can order Odes to Lithium from Alice James Books. 
 

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