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After the Operation

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Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.’s After the Operation reports from the No Man’s Land she wandered following eight hours of surgery to remove a brain tumor. What does the mind feel like after something has been taken out of your skull?  “An uninhabited coast,” or “all shatter and thoroughfare”? These spare poems interweave medical documents, journal entries, and memories, assembling a polyvocal chorus to document the surgery itself and the recuperation process.

The decentralized perspective of After the Operation allows the reader to see the procedure holistically — medically, from the doctor’s perspective; subjectively, from the author’s; and vicariously, from her caretakers’, family’s, and friends’ — while approximating the disassociation the patient feels as she navigates unexpected cognitive and emotional side effects.

Sometimes bleak but always gorgeous, After the Operation does us a great service in illuminating and articulating the complexities of a serious medical event. This tangible chronicle of Gray’s terror, isolation, bafflement, desolation, love, loss, relief and gratitude serves as a beacon for all of us who will one day, as Susan Sontag says, find ourselves dwelling in “the kingdom of the sick.” Gray makes valiant use of her citizenship there, asking, “When they come for you, when the unfamiliar roar comes, and a sudden opening, and light pours in, when what had kept you safe, what had always been, is breached, pried open, and light pours in, what do you want to have been writing then?” After the Operation is her triumphant answer.

Praise for After the Operation:

Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. has compiled and written a notational narrative on things happening to, with, inside, and for her actual brain. She captures the polyphonies of body/memory, matter/ hallucination, past/present as probes into our various paths to knowledge–technical, emotional, and spiritual. This empathetic and exacting serial poem depicts a “self” who just experienced a reset of consciousness, along with a renewed shock of Being—still inexplicable and elusive.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Author of Drafts

Elizabeth Gray was 68 was when she learned that the benign tumor below the frontal lobe of her brain had grown. . After consultations with her doctors and family, she elected to have the tumor removed. If After The Operation sounds like it is going be clinical and dry, you are wrong. It is a book of drifting consciousness, of altered states, memory loss, and inescapable change. Birds show up at her window. She wonders what happened to the pieces of her skull that were removed. The doctor’s reports sound like they were written by Tristan Tzara pretending to be a medically trained bot. She reads the everyday world (or word), sometimes erroneously. She is surgically precise about the hazy state she experiences after what had been part of her goes missing. What else left, she asks. Seeing the brain as a room that has been breached. She wonders (that word again) “what do you want to have been writing then?” The answer: ‘[this] LOVELY LOTIFORM WISHING-CUP IN TRANSLUCENT ALABASTER.

John Yau

Author of Tell It Slant and Please Wait by the Coat Room

Interspersed with narratives from her hospital record, Gray encodes a journey through the biopsychology of identity— physical, spiritual, artistic.

These poems brilliantly enact Rimbaud’s meme, “Je est un autre”: the claim that “I” is an “other” as the starting point for true artistic originality. In Gray, the case is forced. The other is a brain tumor growing in her falx, a curved blade of tissue that partitions the two hemispheres; the tumor that divides her.
First, terror. The invasiveness, the foreignness, is conceived in a way perfectly concordant with the surgeon’s intent: excision, “taking with it / all the family cancers / all my friends’ pulmonary / failures…every malevolence…taken / to the limits of the village / and cast out”. She imagines she can select the deletions “after the erasure”; and choose their replacements: “The ten wheels / Of inexhaustible ornament, / The nine nectars of inner radiance”.

Inflected with Gray’s decades-long study of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, her post-op liminal state is a kind of Bardo, the transitional state between death and rebirth where language meets its limits and otherworldly visions prepare for what is to come. But who is writing? Who survives? Now, in a volta that emerges in the book itself, the poems turn: a feeling for the tumor, for its absence, for what it had been, and meant.

. . . Only the departing surgeons
know that behind the resealed walls hang lily of the valley

curtains and the photo
of a soldier

above where
his bed had been)

The poet begins to worry about the tumor:

. . . How much of it
had been discarded, how much had it overheard

Did it remember her

First the estrangement, then wonderment, and a completely alternate sensibility: Who was invasive? Who were the invaders? The tumor becomes an intimate, mysterious; a lost, loved one. “Something that desired / to be understood // heard, seen / but not touched”. I, an other, irreplaceable by a bone window and a titanium plate.

Riveting, utterly original, Gray mobilizes the matter, the material, of her falx meningioma; not, as does the surgeon, to remove all vestiges, but as a poet. It has become a guiding wonderment, a new lucidity, made from fragments under a bone saw.

“What did it say, the note the tumor had been writing at its desk in the familiar dark?”

Dawn McGuire, MD

Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology

Author of the poetry collections The Aphasia Cafe and American Dream with Exit Wound

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