AustLit

'Experience of mental illness presents a paradox that feels impossible for representation in language: it is at once both too personal and yet too universal for easy translation. Everyone has a measure for how it can be done; from Sylvia Plath to My Chemical Romance to Robin Williams, if we have not experienced mental illness ourselves, we have seen a multitude of others grapple with it and have become (we think) discerning arbiters of the real. For the most part, and particularly in pop culture, there seems to be two somewhat incommensurable ways to render the experience legible: earnestly or through humour. In unskilled hands, both options are rife with pitfalls.' (Introduction)

'David Stavanger is a well- known award-winning writer, performer and psychologist, and his latest collection, Case Notes, has been shortlisted for the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for poetry. The book takes you into a fascinating, quasi psychedelic trip into a mind, a mind sometimes accosted by mental illness and at other times reflecting a god energy in his words. Case Notes has five sections, each section introduced by the Psychology Symbol Ψ, repeating the symbol to number each one.' (Introduction)

'It has to be said, I’ve never reviewed a poetry collection before. So I’m doing this as I see fit and not according to how a review is meant to be done. I don’t offer myself up as an expert, but as a reader who has been unimaginably moved by this work. Every poem took my breath away. If I could cite every poem from this collection in this ‘review’, I would.' (Introduction)