“The uninitiated (bless them!) so often think it begins / with a gaze gone awry.”  So begins this spare, tender collection of poems by Morrow Dowdle.  Identifying as queer and genderfluid, having spent time as both medical provider and patient, Dowdle seeks to address assumptions and misinformation around anorexia nervosa.  Hardly takes the reader through a story-in-verse, both narrative and lyrical, about one individual’s struggle with food restriction, which begins as an attempt to control and make sense of childhood sexual abuse, rather than a desire to fit an aesthetic stereotype.

Hardly exposes the physical, psychological, and spiritual fallout of living over decades with an eating disorder.  It seeks to understand the condition, which defies all rational instinct and “contorts itself in ways / the Twister mat never imagined,” resistant to treatment after years of research.  Despite the stark reality the poems portray, there is an undercurrent of humor and compassion that the body can, one day, be restored to itself, that it is possible to “hack / away the eating disaster to find / its unhappy gardener”—and with it, healing. (Bottlecap Press, 2024).

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