Serotonin: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose on Mental Illness, Suicide, and Neurodivergence
Serotonin Press
$11.99
You can purchase your copy here.
Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan
Serotonin is an online poetry and prose journal founded by Sean Lynch in 2020. Over the course of five years, Serotonin has published poetry and prose focusing on mental illness, suicide, and neurodivergence from countries all over the world, including Australia, Canada, France, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Uganda, the UK, and the US. The anthology itself is divided into ten sections: Depression, Anxiety, ADHD, Autism, OCD, Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, Self-Harm, Eating Disorders, and Trauma. I will discuss four poems from the book from the Depression, Anxiety, Autism, and Self-Harm sections. Please note that due to the nature of this astoundingly vital collection superbly collated by Sean Lynch there will be difficult topics discussed.
Full disclosure, I am included in this anthology, but, of course, I will not review my own poem. I would not even know where to begin. I do think the subject matter and the work of these brave poets does deserve a review in Mad Poets Society.
I also fortunately know several of the brave and talented poets in this anthology. For my review, I decided to review poets I did not know well or at all, in a spirit of fairness.
In the first and largest section, Depression, a poem that stood out to me for its succinct, vivid detail is “My Shrink’s Waiting Room” by Gary Bloom. It starts with the wry observation: “Everyone’s head stays down/studying the rudely stained carpet/(the Prozac tremors knocking the coffee from our cups).” In just three lines, Bloom’s voice is sensitive yet defiant, humorous yet sad.
In a society where men do not discuss their mental health enough, I welcome Bloom’s directness: “afraid to look up and be assessed/who exit their paneled (padded?) offices/and glad hand new arrivals like Walmart greeters.” Bloom paints the scene so skillfully with surprising diction that you are there with the speaker. His wit serving as the magazine to distract you from the wait. He ends the poem with the stunning lines: “while I make my way to the vacant chair/where I sit uncomfortably/in someone else’s warmth.”
I had to read “night reading mode” by Cynthia Arrieu-King in the Anxiety section multiple times to fully understand and appreciate its rich imagery. It describes an activity so many of us engage in reading, perhaps doomscrolling, our cell phone before bed, rejecting all the self-help articles we may read before bed saying this is not good for our circadian rhythms. But I digress. Arrieu-King opens this exquisite poem with
she gestures toward a pink cloud inside digital forest
wallpaper and says:
this is my cloud. it contains all my data
uncle moon sees the white screen in my glasses
and he kicks on night reading mode—
I am impressed by this sleepy time, almost bedtime story like, syrupy rhythm of these lines. Perhaps, anxiety itself is winding down before bed, suspended, but may well return. The brilliant closing lines address this reality: “the ball dropped to the street doesn’t bounce/a dead path, footsteps stopped mid-stairs, an immovable/string on a guitar.” This is a poem I will return to multiple times.
“Revelation” by Matthew Feinstein is a powerful prose/prose-poem piece in the Autism section. It begins with the haunting, fatalistic sentence: “My memories of you are now reduced to a single night spent curled up on a recliner while you read me the bible before bed.” Due to the strictures of religion, the narrator worries “Part of me thought you worried I would rot in hell. Not because I do drugs or have sex, but because I was different.” Being different exposes the narrator to increasingly violent taunts from his classmates, but still he writes “What I would give to hug another one of God’s children & feel another body against my own.”
He does find a connection with the girl next door. Even that morphs into sin and temptation. Feinstein continues, “I am still looking for acceptance.” The narrator runs into the bullies who seem to lurk behind every sentence in this work. The last encounter causes the narrator to reckon with his faith, confessing to his dead mother: “And I’m sorry, Momma, but I can no longer believe in God. How could I? Four of his children were about to slit my throat.” This piece floored me. Feinstein possesses a rich command of rhetorical strategy, used here to devastating effect.
The final poem I will discuss comes from the Self-Harm section. In “Guillotine Blues,” Avra Margariti uses the beheadings of both Catherine Howard (fifth wife of Henry VIII) and King Charles I as historical metaphors to explore the narrator’s desire for self-harm. Howard’s death reminds the narrator of
how I would practice my own death throughout my
childhood: stand on the edges of tall buildings, see how many
pills I could fit like marshmallows in my mouth, call it an
accident when I cut my fingers on sharp objects.
In the second stanza, the narrator “learns that King Charles I wore two heavy,/layered shirts during his public beheading. He didn’t want to shiver.” This fact leads to the powerful lines:
I looked
down at my arms, the long shirtsleeves hiding all unhealthy
practices-turned-habits. I rolled up my sleeves and let the
cool air nip at my skin, let myself shiver.
Margariti expertly employes historical details in two stylistically balanced stanzas. This poem, and the three other poems I reviewed, would be standouts in any and all anthologies.
Serotonin is an anthology that will break your heart, perhaps, but it will also remind you that you are not alone. It covers difficult subject matter, but all the poets write with such precision and passion about important subjects, often ignored by the population-at-large, that I cannot recommend this anthology highly enough. I could have chosen any of these strong poems to represent this collection. Necessary work is being done by the journal, Serotonin. Work that I hope this review has done justice to and work that I hope is exposed to people who may have been previously unaware of it.
Sean Hanrahan is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collection Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt Press) and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone Press) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). His work has also been included in several anthologies, including Moonstone Featured Poets, Queer Around the World, and Stonewall’s Legacy, and several journals, including Impossible Archetype, Mobius, Peculiar, Poetica Review, and Voicemail Poems. He has taught classes titled A Chapbook in 49 Days and Ekphrastic Poetry and hosted poetry events throughout Philadelphia.