Part poetic experiment and part memoir, Swollening attempts to diagnose what has been undiagnosable, tracing an uneven path from a lifetime of swallowing bad feelings - homophobia in its external and internalised manifestations, heteronormativity, anxiety surrounding desire, aversion to sex - to a body in revolt. In poems that speak using the grammar and logics of sickness, Purcell offers a dizzying collision of word and image that is the language of pain alongside the banality of living on.
