It wasn’t long into reading April Gibson’s book of poems, The Span of a Small Forever (Amistad, 2024), that I felt a jolt of recognition. While I knew Gibson’s collection circled around themes of illness, I didn’t realize we shared the same diagnosis of Crohn’s disease. Emily Dickinson wrote that poetry should feel as if the top of your head were taken off; Gibson’s poems performed this neurosurgery on me, extracting images and feelings I recognized from my own illness experience and placing them with great craft and care onto the page.
Gibson’s first full-length poetry collection explores the trauma and joy of living as a Black woman with chronic illness. Her writing is rangy—at turns dark and funny, at times tightly formal, followed immediately by more casual prose. Throughout her collection, Gibson uses the lens of her body to question wider assumptions about womanhood, race, motherhood, and religion. Ultimately, her poems invite us to bear witness to survival.
I was grateful to meet Gibson over Zoom this spring to chat about recasting biblical narratives, the delights of poetic form, and the double trauma of navigating both illness and a deeply flawed medical system.
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The Rumpus: Your book starts with amazing intensity and intimacy. The first section, “How to Survive Holding Your Breath,” grapples with your experience of Crohn’s disease, from misdiagnosis to daily pain to a traumatic surgery. How did you decide to begin your collection here?
April Gibson: It took a while to figure out how everything was connected. You experience all these difficult things as an adult and you think those are the traumas of your life, but it took me many years of introspection to realize that being a sick kid—I was so young, eleven years old—was the first real wounding I experienced. It all came back to my illness: the way that I see life, my relationships with people, my self-image, how I encounter systems. It made sense for me to start the book there because everything grows out of that traumatic and life-altering experience. It can’t be isolated. It’s a kind of origin story.
Rumpus: I was haunted by an image from that first section where, after five feet of your intestines are removed, you describe peeling medical tape from your body: “my skin forever sticky with adhesive and someone else’s nude.” You experience illness in a Black female body, and in these small moments, you crystallize so clearly the misogyny and racism of the medical–industrial complex. In writing about my own Crohn’s disease, I have found that narrativizing my experience has allowed me to be more fully in touch with my anger at these broken systems. What has writing about your illness clarified for you?
Gibson: That’s a big question because it changes over time. When I was young, I wrote to have someone listen to me without judgment. As I’m sure you know, some of the things people want to discuss when they find out you have a chronic condition—it’s a vulnerable space and it can be very shameful—writing was a place to put them. It also became a space where I could have a conversation with myself, first and foremost. It was a space where I would not be silenced or dismissed. I could be more than a report or a number. I could be more than just what is written in the doctors’ notes. I could be the fullness of me. And it was also a place to put the anger that I couldn’t direct toward physicians, though I’m not going to lie, I definitely have done that too.
Rumpus: As you should!
Gibson: When I was a kid, I wasn’t able to read about other people’s experiences of Crohn’s. There just wasn’t anything in 1997, 1998. I was so desperate to find myself. I went to the library and looked through the card catalog, but I didn’t see anything. So I eventually started to read case studies in medical journals of people with Crohn’s, and I would look to see: Is she a girl? Is she my age? Is she Black? It showed me that people who experience illness need to see themselves reflected in the literature. Writing about illness is a way to push back against all the pathologizing and dismissiveness. It allowed me to be in charge of my own narrative.
And specifically to that line you referenced—“my skin forever sticky with adhesive and someone else’s nude”—even though there was so much going on in that time of my life, and I had undergone this pretty radical surgery of an irreversible ostomy, that tape was the thing that unraveled me. I have to wear this appliance for the rest of my life, and the color of the tape didn’t even match my skin. My skin was not a priority. I was not a part of the conversation. You can find these issues of misogyny and racism in the smallest gestures, and it feels so big to the person experiencing it.
Rumpus: I love the idea of these poems broadening or exploding the narrative physicians have written in your medical chart. Not only is it so essential for people who have experienced illness to have access to stories like yours but also for medical providers. I’m curious if you have fantasies about your doctors reading these poems.
Gibson: It’s actually not a fantasy, I sent them my book! Medicine is better now than it was twenty years ago, and I am better at advocating for myself. I have noticed an improvement in the medical providers I have had contact with over time, and I really envision that my providers reading these poems will open up a conversation. Not all patients are going to be as assertive as I have been. The power dynamic between patient and doctor is extremely strong, and there is a lot of shame. The way we learn about each other is through stories, and hopefully, these poems will help create empathy in this important space.
Rumpus: To become an advocate for yourself and others with chronic illness, we have to somehow reduce that shame you mentioned. In your poems, you seem to be working through a lot of ideas about shame, blame, and causality across many arenas: religion, motherhood, intergenerational racial trauma. In what ways did your Crohn’s disease, an autoimmune condition in which your body literally attacks itself, serve as a helpful or troublesome metaphor to explore these themes?
Gibson: For me, it’s always that my body, on the one hand, is working so hard against me. But on the other hand, it’s the same body that is working to heal me. You can find these parallels everywhere, even in having kids or practicing religion. It’s having two things be true at the same time. My body wants to heal me, and my body wants to hurt me. My children love me, and sometimes they act like they don’t. You have the institution of a religion, and then you have people’s personal experience with faith, which is in conflict. How do you reconcile these misdirected threats? You have to bring these conflicts into balance constantly. With Crohn’s disease—and any chronic autoimmune disease—you have to work for that balance. Otherwise, you might not make it. That is a difficult thing to accept: I have to wake up every day for the rest of my life and make these choices. And as frustrated as I am with medicine, I am still accountable to take care of myself. Writing has helped me find balance between accountability and that responsibility of blame.
Rumpus: Another way you explore blame throughout the collection is by your delightful recasting of Eve. You compare yourself to Eve, dispute her origin as Adam’s rib, and later wonder if she really was responsible for “the Fall”—I love the line: “Why would we trust the word of a snake?” Can you speak more about the role of Eve in your book?
Gibson: Eve makes sense if you want to examine ideas about women. Because . . . she’s the first one! She’s the first wife, the first mother, the first woman to be desired, the first woman to be despised, the first woman to grieve, the first woman to be fooled and to fool. The Bible was one of the first books I read. The older I got and the more I developed a feminist lens, I thought, “I don’t really know how I feel about how women are being represented here.” Not even just in the Bible story but in the iterations that we see of this narrative in society and culture, that Eve is this example of original sin. I love to step back and try to have a new point of entry into a story. Part of that is because of my curiosity, my belief system, and my background in literature and philosophy. It’s also a lot to do with the narratives about my people, about Black folks. Where did these stories come from? I’m always trying to retell the story and look at it again. Most people know Eve, or they think they do. And I want them to think about that a little bit harder. I also didn’t realize I wrote about Eve so much. It must be subconscious!
Rumpus: I had a similar experience when my first book came out. People who read it pointed out all these connections I hadn’t necessarily intended. That’s the amazing thing about poetry: it happens all on its own. What, perhaps more consciously, do you hope people take away from reading your book?
Gibson: I hope that they get the usual things that people receive when they read literature: a little bit of empathy and understanding. I also want the writing to go where the need is. I hope it starts conversations that people haven’t been having, not just about Crohn’s and chronic illness but how those experiences interact with all other areas of life. I was worried that people wouldn’t see how these intersections of identity are so essential. When we talk about one thing, we are always talking about other things. I want for people to stop believing the lies they are told about themselves. We have a lot of talk about self-love in our current culture, but what does that really mean? Sometimes it means remembering to take your medicine.
Rumpus: I want to pivot a bit to another aspect of your book that I admire, which is its attentiveness to form. I ran out of fingers counting the number of formal structures you play with, from erasure to pantoum, ghazal to prose poems. What draws you to write in form? How do you go about selecting a form for an individual poem? And, on a wider scale, how did you determine the formal structure—seven titled sections—of this book?
Gibson: I like form! I’m going to write the story however it needs to get told. I’ll say first that form is really good at generating work. It pushes you to achieve what the form is asking. That doesn’t mean it will stay that way. Sometimes I will write the same poem in different forms. The form is choosing the poem, in a way. For example, for the erasure poem, which is an erasure of the Mayo Clinic article on Crohn’s disease, I was thinking, “What are you reading between the lines? This is just a description of a disease, but what does it really mean for me?”I could’ve tried a different form, but this is what worked. Form is always purposeful, even if it didn’t start that way. And form is fun! You spend all these years learning the forms, you might as well write some poems in it. It’s part of the tradition of poetry. I use a lot of prose and open form as well.
As to the sections of the book, every poet is tortured over how to organize their first book. If the publisher thinks it works, then all right! I did work hard to group the poems into sections, and once these were grouped appropriately, in my view, it was a lot easier to say, “This will come first and this, second.” I also wanted to consider that the poems become quite dark and heavy at times, so I intentionally buffered these with some lighter pieces. At times it was too much for me, and if it’s too much for me, it’s too much for the reader.
Rumpus: I love how form enacts content in your book. At the beginning of the book, the erasure poem of the Mayo Clinic article immediately gives us this visual dichotomy of white and black, foreshadowing so many of the throughlines of race and racism throughout the book. Some erasure poems you can see underneath the crossed-out sections, and here you can’t see any of it.
Gibson: Right! But if you or a loved one had been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, you likely read this Mayo article at some point, so you may have interacted with that text before.
Rumpus: Totally. It was a third of the way through this poem that I realized you had Crohn’s disease because I had this sense of, “Wait a second, this looks familiar.” That was a really interesting experience that I’ve never had with an erasure poem. It’s almost like a little wink.
Gibson: And some of the content crossed out, you don’t want to say! Because it’s not pleasant. Like diarrhea—
Rumpus: Or fistulas!
Gibson: Exactly.
Rumpus: Your rhymed poem, “Superstar,” reminded me of Derrick Austin’s villanelle, “Summertime.” In both poems, the speaker is reflecting on their relationship with their grandparents while listening to music that becomes enacted in the repetitions and rhymes of the poems’ forms. Are there poets or poems with whom you feel a strong formal kinship?
Gibson: It’s always hard when you start asking questions about other writers! As a Chicagoan, Gwendolyn Brooks was very influential in me even writing at all. The first poem I ever read was “We Real Cool.” I still remember that from fourth grade. Her care for her community was amazing, she was everywhere. Another Chicagoan is Patricia Smith. I can’t write like her, and I don’t need to write like her, but if I could write like anyone, it would be her. The way we think we write about ourselves is the way she writes about other people. Also, Lucille Clifton and Audre Lorde—all these writers are part of my lineage.
Rumpus: I wanted to end by thinking about the word “survivor,” which you use many times throughout this collection. I feel strongly that this is a book about someone who has, despite countless sorrows, thrived. Can you speak about how poetry—writing it, reading it, being in community around it—has contributed to your resilience?
Gibson: Some people say that writing is like therapy. I think that people should go to real therapy! But writing can be a way to release. However, that is not where literature ends. You may start there, but then you have to craft it. Writing is important to me in terms of documenting things that might otherwise be lost. I always talk about how the people I descend from were not even allowed to read. And it is an amazing feat knowing that I am a writer and a poet, and this is my life. I want to collect that narrative so it is not erased. And I want to be in community, to be in fellowship and relationship with readers.
As to surviving, I look at the girl on these pages, and she survived a lot. I like to point out to people when they read these poems that I’m not in that place anymore. I am writing about somebody who almost feels like a different person. But I am giving that girl the care and the concern, the empathy and the support that I couldn’t get. And that is thriving for me, healing that person.
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Author photograph courtesy of April Gibson
