Toxemia by Christine McNair

In this alchemy of anger and love, history and memoir, Christine McNair delves into various forms of toxicity in the body—from the effects of two life-threatening preeclampsia diagnoses to chronic illness, sexism in medicine, and the toll of societal expectations.

With catharsis and humour, Toxemia pieces together the complexities of identity, motherhood, and living in a body to reveal deeply recognizable raw truths. McNair captures the wrenching feeling of loss of control in the face of an overwhelming medical diagnosis and the small, endless moments in life that underscore it: worrying about mortality in the middle of the night, revolving medical appointments, self-doubt, and all the ways in which illness interrupts.

Toxemia unravels the toxicities that haunt the human body from within and without. Combining lyrical essays, prose poetry, photographs, and more, this hybrid work dips between the sacred and profane, exposing—and holding—some of our greatest fears.

Praise for Toxemia

“Toxemia is simultaneously a history in/of medicine, a feminist rallying cry, and a raw but scalpel-sharp work of poetry. A genre-blurring text that boldly bloodies lines between poetic and reproductive bodies, between archive and lyric, between manifesto and song, between autoethnography and free verse. A bodypoem flex.” —Sarah de Leeuw, author of Lot

“How much pressure can build in language before the story of women’s health blows apart? In Toxemia, Christine McNair tests the narrative as if it were a problem patient. She charts the events that bring her close to death several times with the skill of the most intuitive midwives and rigorous clinicians, though representation is not diagnostic. This is a beautiful etiological study.” —Elee Kraljii Gardiner, author of Trauma Head and Against Death: 35 Essays on Living

“Toxemia is astonishing. It’s difficult to use positive adjectives for something so searing and widespread as toxicity in all its forms as it is portrayed in this book. But what can be said is that we need this book. We need  ‘a pattern that is only legible’ to McNair. If nothing else, in this undetermined narrative, we may read our multiple selves, our own fragilities to systemic damage and unutterable forces beyond our control.” —Madhur Anand, Governor General’s Literary Award–winning author of This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart

Press Coverage

Poets recommend: rob mclennan recommends Toxemia —League of Canadian Poets

Most Anticipated: Our Fall 2024 Poetry Preview —49th Shelf

44 Canadian poetry collections to watch for in fall 2024 —CBC Books

A List for Lost Words: A Recommended Reading List by Christine McNair —49th Shelf

“Toxemia speaks to the hard-won values of persistence and survival—of managing life’s challenges—but it also rises to celebrate the tenacity of the blooming that arrives alongside the struggle. There’s such beauty in that revelation, and perhaps that it why this work is so gloriously more about growth and strength than about destruction or weakness.” —Kim Fahner, periodicities

“Christine McNair blends high and low cultures, arts and science, words and images, memoir and research to tell the story of her life as a woman with a body, a body that is so often wrong or dangerous, her symptoms and experience disbelieved, disregarded. McNair’s experiences of pre-eclampsia during her two pregnancies don’t just have consequences for her mental and physical health in the years afterwards, but also tap into her experiences with depression, self-harm, and eating disorders… Though with Toxemia, she’s made art of that story, a moving and compelling narrative, strange and edgy, unsettling. Unputdownable.” —Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This

Navigating Vulnerabilities in Life Writing with Paige Maylott, Christine McNair, and Maurice Vellekoop —Hollay Ghadery

A ‘best of’ list of 2024 Canadian poetry books —rob mclennan’s blog

Face Out: Our Favourite Book Covers of 2024 —Hamilton Review of Books

“McNair’s writing has always had an edge, but Toxemia employs a further level of visceral, with the strength and wisdom of knowing when to write directly and when to write slant, a multitude of blended lyric threads. She examines layers of her own past history, interweaving information on women’s health and health-approaches (and dismissals), to attempt a handle on exactly where she is now, moving through motherhood to illness to disability.” —reading in the margins: Chrstine McNair, from rob mclennan’s clever Substack

“I started with a vague sense that this was a story about complications from pregnancy. By the time I finished, I realized what an idiot I was—and I was drowned in respect for McNair for the numerous subtle turns, explanations, and descriptions she provides of multiple near death experiences and the mysterious, tenuous connections between cause and effect, especially as related to the fragility of life and the monstrous uncertainties that regulate (or not) the human body… Narrative loose ends abound, as in this situation they must. The bottom line is life persists, the book was written. And it’s terrific.” —Michael Bryson’s Art/Life: Scribblings Substack