Stigmata - Scott Jackshaw

The poems in Stigmata are ruinous encounters between traumatic and historical memory. They transfigure the cult of the wound into a mystic frenzy of sex, grief, and noise. Drawing inspiration from a broad archive of texts and practices – apophatic theology, body horror, gardening, queer theory, classic films, poststructuralism, and bad sex – Stigmata forms a counterhistory of the wound, an experiment in fractured memoir and misplaced anatomy that weaponizes the confessional mode, wrenching it from self-narration to approach a violence that breaks language and bodies apart. Stigmata fuses the “high” to the “low” – the “sacred” of theory and theology to the “profane” of leaking and lust. The result is a treacherous adventure through the crosscurrents of sexual deviancy and religion, helped along by a bitter sense of humour, to the limits of faith and body.