The Symptoms of Living
"I was not born with blood in mouth / Or skin between my teeth."
Survival is not a quiet act; it is a biological tax. In The Symptoms of Living, Jasmine Erice-Harling presents a visceral dissection of the self, mapped across the threshold where the clinical meets the gothic.
The foundation of the collection lies in The Scratched Start and The Inherited Trap, where a heavy sense of determinism reveals innocence corrupted before it could even begin. Moving through the damp landscapes of the domestic gothic, these poems explore the biology of debt and trauma as a physical inheritance. It is an interrogation of pre-emptive damage, circular familial guilt, and the suffocating devotion found in the comfort of the cage.
From this stagnation, the work enters The Clinical State, where mental health is rendered as a physical landscape and a clinical sentence. The interrogation moves into the Market of Flesh to explore the gaze through three distinct lenses: inanimate materials, the culinary body, and the curated icon. These poems dissect the fragility of being seen, the hunger of consumption, and the performance of the gendered commodity.
The journey continues into the Molecular Chemistry, a section of attachment studies documenting the many faces of love. Here, love is a biological merging and a gothic organic takeover. It exists as a physical melody, the anxious gravity of the fragile tactile, a redemptive sanctuary of second chances, and a supernatural loyalty that crosses into death. Rejecting the hollow promise of recovery, the collection culminates in The Alchemical Shift. This is the violent transmutation of the base lead of trauma into power, marking the death of the patient and the reveal of a reclaimed monster that has learned to weaponise the very symptoms of living.
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