The Patient Is an Unreliable Historian

"In the darkly challenging poetry book, The Patient Is an Unreliable Historian, Craig pulls back the curtain on the lived experience of psychiatric patients, offering heartbreaking insight into mental health treatment models, demanding that we make change. . . . It’s also one of the most beautiful and captivating collections of poetry about mental illness by a contemporary author." * New York Journal of Books *
“The Patient Is an Unreliable Historian begins off script, where the patient diagnoses the failures of medicine. From the clinic to the prison cell, this book speaks through those abandoned or abused by systems of care. Craig’s words alight with a madness that has both the fervid imagination of a raveling mind and lucid anger forged in struggle. With a poet’s lyricism and a critic’s cutting insight, Craig carves queer possibilities into the open road between Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas. Here, freedom is a covenant we make with one another—a promise ‘to keep / us each alive.’” -- V. Jo Hsu, author of "Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics"
"The Patient is an Unreliable Historian subverts everything we think about madness and what it means to be a patient. A beautiful, haunting, and tender lyrical memoir." -- Alice Wong, author of "Year of the Tiger"
"A scheduled ghost—an ecstatic poet for this strange era, Craig’s The Patient is an Unreliable Historian is a collection of devotions. The poet writes, 'I am limited / to the memorial / of language,' and these poems go ahead and build their own shrines anyway. Another poet of the ecstatic, Allen Ginsberg wrote, 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.' Now, it’s Parrish Craig who catalogues the destruction by state-sanctioned violence. In each poem, a prayer—not to any gods but us. Not to any gods but transsexuals, addicts, the disabled, queers, beloveds, lilacs, and tenderness. This book is not a memorial, it is a march." -- Canese Jarboe, author of "SISSY"
"Craig’s The Patient is an Unreliable Historian contains a lyric both dazzling in its calm and tender in its storm. The speaker in Craig’s poems knows the body as an intimate archive of potential: '& maybe I’m going / under the knife / to sing with other angels.' This is an exercise in autonomy, in liberation for the love of personhood. The joy in this collection if free from economy and is lives in the commons: 'say pennies lie / peonies grow.'" -- C.T. Salazar, author of "Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking"
"Craig is a singular, urgent voice born of the South. But Craig grew up in a different battlefield, an unbuckled Bible Belt, where Americans 'made the missing into headlines' and 'played the prison like a savior.' This is an America where the body becomes a 'criminal,' the hospital isn’t a 'safe space,' 'cis- subtitle / our language,' and barriers 'keep disabled / out.' Craig’s poetry has a distinct vision that trespasses borders and punctuations, breathes revolution and evolution. The Patient Is an Unreliable Historian is a collection of psalms, 'the split husk sacrament' where if you 'hold / the notes so long / the sound unblocks / each door you know