PROCESS NOTES
“Insured Patients” is rooted in parapraxis—the Freudian slip, the thing you didn’t know you were thinking that reveals itself in another way. I’d been researching the gendered response to threat of nuclear war in the 1950s and the sexualization of its propaganda for my new collection of poems, and when I read through the pamphlet “Survival Under Atomic Attack,” I tripped over the word “cancer.” It was hours after my annual mammogram, and I’d happened to grab a pamphlet on breast cancer screening while waiting. My mind immediately equated the two ideas. What is a body if not an atomic bomb in enemy hands? A few days later, I walked down an aisle of a craft store, saw some pink ribbon, and bought it. While my mother was treated for breast cancer and after she “survived,” she was surrounded by pink ribbons (the symbol of hope for breast cancer), pink quilts, pink Harley t-shirts... there was pink everywhere. When breast cancer finally killed her, we didn’t know what to do with all the pink she left behind. In this spirit, I used pink ribbon to block out whatever didn’t suit the developing poem and stitched the documents together to explore the complications of hope, our inability to comprehend our daily chances of survival, the fear of attack from both inside and outside our bodies, as well as the language government and other people in power use to distract us from these fears.
WORKS CITED
US Government, Survival Under Atomic Attack, Washington D.C, 1950.
Images taken from a variety of breast cancer awareness pamphlets.
Angela Voras-Hills’s first book, Louder Birds (Pleiades 2020) was awarded the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize. Her writing has appeared in The Sun, Kenyon Review Online, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Best New Poets, and New Ohio Review, among other journals and anthologies. She has received support from The Sustainable Arts Foundation, Key West Literary Seminar, and Writers’ Room of Boston. She lives with her family in Milwaukee, where she is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin and runs The Book Drop Reading Series.