Selena Mercuri
Concetta Principe, DISORDER
Guelph: Gordon Hill Press, 2024. $20.00
Concetta Principe’s latest poetry collection, Disorder, transforms the idea of home into a labyrinth of mental and emotional unrest. The collection opens with the poem “RUNNING FROM THE SUNSHINE OF MY LIFE,” which immediately sets the tone for a book that grapples with the erosion of stability and the desperation to escape both internal and external turmoil. From there, Principe moves us into the BASEMENT section, signalling a descent into deeper, darker emotional terrain. Later sections, such as KITCHEN, continue this thematic exploration, turning traditional spaces of comfort into disorienting sites of reflection on the speaker’s inner chaos. By structuring the collection around parts of a house, Principe underscores how mental illness can corrupt even the most familiar places, transforming home from a sanctuary into a site of conflict and fragmentation.
Principe’s exploration of identity and mental health is deeply personal, reflecting her experiences with Borderline Personality Disorder and an eating disorder. These conditions inform the collection’s pre-occupation with instability and competition in poems like “CATCH 22,” where the speaker asks, “am I / too old, Clorinda? / a mule in a cattle field? / spluttering ‘Marcia, Marcia, Marcia’ Brady?” These allusions bridge literary and pop-cultural spheres, juxtaposing Clorinda, the warrior woman from Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, with a line echoing the sibling rivalry in The Brady Bunch. The result is a layered portrait of internal conflict: the speaker is simultaneously a tragic figure of strength and a vulnerable subject grasping for recognition in the chaotic landscape of their mind.
This tension is carried into poems like “PARTY FAVOURS,” where the speaker reflects on childhood memories steeped in competition and resentment:
She thorns
the day of self
pity at the age of six playing
catch up to the screaming
stick of the tail on the ass
of a donkey dress torn in the tree
of a three-legged race
that her sister takes, the way she
took the best shirt, the first
slice of her birthday
cake and maybe stole her wish
oh to wish
to just melt away.
The tangled imagery here captures the formative wounds that shape the speaker’s sense of self, where even a childhood game becomes a site of emotional injury. The prose poem “DESTROYER OF WORLDS” shifts the focus to a pivotal breaking point:
The day she knew she needed something more than the Valium
her mother was pushing on her, was the day she had trashed
every object of her dear life [...] as if all these little items
of life, the little angel gifted on a birthday, the stones collected,
each pattern with a particular life meaning, the candle and
the pens, the ruler, the stickies, were at fault for her failing to
survive.
This passage resonates with the collection’s opening poem, “RUNNING FROM THE SUNSHINE OF MY LIFE,” where the act of discarding or destroying objects becomes a metaphor for the desperate attempt to sever ties with a painful past. Just as these cherished objects lose their comfort and take on a sense of betrayal, so too does the home in this collection become a site of instability rather than refuge.
Throughout Disorder, Principe’s language is strikingly visceral and precise. Her use of enjambment and white space mirrors the fragmented mental landscapes she explores, drawing readers into the pauses and silences that punctuate the chaos. The collection’s structural and thematic coherence makes it a profound meditation on the fragility of the mind and the spaces it inhabits. In both content and form, Disorder is an extraordinary exploration of the intersections of mental health and home. Principe’s ability to weave personal introspection with broader cultural and literary references enriches the text, making it both deeply specific and universally resonant. For readers willing to step into its haunted house of words, the collection offers an unflinching look at the complexities of living with mental illness. It is a work of profound vulnerability that both demands and rewards careful attention and reflection.
SELENA MERCURI
is a Toronto-based writer currently working on her debut novel, which explores themes of identity and generational trauma. She holds a B.A. in political science from the University of Toronto and is studying book publishing at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, Room Magazine, The Literary Review of Canada, The Hart House Review, and The Seaboard Review. She was the recipient of the Norma Epstein Foundation Award for Creative Writing.