Jyl Anais’s Soft out spoken

Many women have faced the struggle of medical gaslighting – a physician who ignores their endometriosis symptoms, an ER doctor who writes them off as dramatic instead of recognizing that they are having a heart attack, or a psychiatrist who chooses to medicate before understanding the nuances of a woman’s illness. This sad but not uncommon reality is the catalyst for Jyl Anais’s poetry collection Soft Out Spoken. In each poem, she weaves together terse and impactful lines about her journey to finding the proper mental health diagnosis.

Soft Out Spoken explores the relationship between mind and body and asks us to trust our own judgement. The collection is empowering and may be especially so for anyone who has experienced health trauma. Anais’s experimental and cutting poems show readers the disillusionment that comes from fighting so hard to deal with symptoms while your doctor insists you have a different disease entirely.

Each poem reads as a declaration, as if the poet is thrusting down a flag and staking claim to her truth regardless of judgement. “You told me you could help / that the pills would / and then you drained my life out / slowly…” Anais writes in “Dear Psychiatry.” The strength radiating from each line lies in the images as much as the diction. In “Medicine v,” the speaker exudes confidence, “… I leaned into the space / between us / in the examining room / and said, / ‘That’s okay, / I needed to take my power back’[.]”

The collection expands to include poems about politics (Election Day) and the experiences of health trauma victims who were not believed: “Your men raped / a woman / in uniform… / Then you diagnosed her / with a ‘personality disorder”  (Act of War).

The speaker’s understandable anger pulses throughout the narrative. Her incorrect diagnosis – one that never truly explained her symptoms and one that her physicians doubled down on for two years despite her concern that it was not the proper diagnosis – fuels a determination that demands to be heard on each page.

Overall, the collection reads as an empowering story of a woman taking control of her body and her health. The overarching message of the collection – that we should trust our own mind and body above anyone else’s – is just as interesting as the lived experiences recounted in the poems.

Readers who are interested in experimental forms will find poems in Soft Out Spoken that intrigue and startle them. Those who have dealt with their own health trauma may find the collection empowering, and at the very least, full of empathy. Anais weaves together the lived and the observed into a beautiful book that asks us to trust ourselves more than anything.

July, 2020