To Heal Is to Dream in Constellation: A Glimpse Into Eleni Stecopoulos’ Visionary Poetics of Entanglement
A Review Essay
by Caterina Stamou
Eleni Stecopoulos, Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing, New York: Nightboat Books, 2024. Pp. 432.
Where does healing take us? The idea of healing as a journey is a popular one; perhaps, even, convenient as it anticipates a linear, simple resolution: that of healing as a pathway to a certain destination. Eleni Stecopoulos’ brilliant latest book, Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing, contests and complicates that idea, deviating from healing as it has largely been construed within the Western biomedical framework.
Employing a revelatory analysis into the significance of healing in and for our culture(s) through its various entanglements within the political, spiritual and collective life, the book can justifiably be described as one of the most distinctive and idiosyncratic accounts on the concept of healing over the last years: its experimental methodology blends critical inquiry, contemporary poetics and diasporic writing to examine the affective and political possibilities of healing beyond its individualistic and reductionist appropriations by neoliberal and extractivist systems, while also turning to poetry’s transformative force to think through remedy and recovery from a profoundly holistic, embodied and politically-informed perspective. In the writer’s words: “healing had an unknown destination or had no destination; it came and went ‘in the land of pain’” (8), an assertion that unsettles oversimplified paradigms of illness at a time when the emergence of healing culture in the aftermath of Covid-19 pandemic has been widely reinforced by the wellness industrial complex.
Stecopoulos’ invitation to navigate healing as a possibility of resistance against the modern commodification and aestheticization of health challenges us to consider the politicized conditions within which our therapeutic practices take place:
To understand healing as a triumph—or failure—of the individual, a journey of self-transformation, is to remain entranced by a peculiarly American enterprise. To comply with neoliberalism. To fall for the lie of imperial time (8).
A writer deeply concerned with the stakes of our times, Stecopoulos deploys an innovative, interconnective epistemology that bridges seemingly diverse cultural threads to unravel the ways through which the literary, the personal, the spiritual and the political are intrinsically intertwined. Already in her previous, thought-provoking work, Visceral Poetics,1 Stecopoulos guides us through a rich mosaic of histories, people and artistic lineages that constitutes a paradigmatic shift beyond the Western-centric framework of pathologization into a cross-fertilizing approach that encompasses poetics, autoethnography, somatics, and critical theory for a different reading on the relation between illness and artmaking.
Mobilizing a meditation that builds on the overlapping undercurrents between critical and poetic thinking, her latest book uses poetry as an “open field”2 to unlock a reconfiguration of healing through its material and conceptual associations with dreaming, while situating the concept’s practical potential within experimental poetry lineages and critical accounts that interrogate the politics of healing within broader systems of multiple oppressions, such as settler colonialism, racism and capitalism.3 Through various interconnections between poetry, remedy, social practice, and dreams, her book recasts healing as a process tied to the possibilities of our collective vision, informed by the writer’s attention to the relational and the intersectional: scaffolding healing as dreaming in constellation. It encourages us to contemplate on how healing encounters and is encountered by medicine, history, displacement, psychoanalysis, collective consciousness, politics, lived experience, language and art in critical times, activating questions of epistemic and political mutuality that associate the local with the translocal, the clinical with the poetic, and the present with the ancestral.
The book traces a lineage that embarks with the Asklepieion shrine in ancient Greece, as a methodological and affective entry point that unravels a cross-border filament, which looks at the land as a symbol of perseverance and ancestral knowledge. Drawing from the dormitory of ancient Epidaurus, Stecopoulos locates her country of origin as a point of departure in her exploration of traditional and collective healing methods [given that “neither incubation nor healing were individual endeavors” (14)]), recontextualizing ancient Greece’s medical histories by going beyond their often-unidimensional interpretation from the logocentric European narratives, which stripped them from their ritualistic and shamanic contexts.
The practice of incubation (enkoimesis), through which the suppliant was guided by the healer in a sleeping chamber known as the abaton in order to be given a divine healing remedy, operates here as the conceptual framework for Stecopoulos’ poetic reconfiguration of healing, through which she expands her thinking on the concept of aporia, “a place of stillness [that] replicates the impasse of living with a condition for a long time” (23). Building on the abaton as an epistemic space, Stecopoulos elaborates on the confluence between healing and poetics to investigate the hidden trajectories between land and dream, origin and imagination, impasse and interoception. Thereby, healing in Dreaming in the Fault Zone unfolds itself in the liminal space between illness and remedy, belonging and loss, genealogy and fabrication, movement and stillness, poetry and documentation, leaving the question of both origin and destination intentionally open. Through this multi-layered scope, Stecopoulos supplies us with an understanding of healing as bound to imagination, a process of rethinking and remaking the world, and a means of disobeying epistemic boundaries through the merging of poetry, medicine and interdisciplinary research.
Far from providing a merely personal account of chronic illness and rehabilitation that turns to literature as a healing practice, Stecopoulos’ investigative poetics is manifold, using the personal as an axis to develop a translocal and transhistorical cartography of constellations that is shaped by her diasporic situatedness, and expands healing towards a reparative methodology which bridges previously divided contexts, narratives and histories. Under this lens, Stecopoulos’ inquiry into healing is embedded within a worldly thinking that she develops by returning to the land—as abaton or fault zone—through its resonances with other geographies. Her engagement with Greek and Greek American contexts does not offer a fixed diasporic memoir or ethnographic account of medical history; rather, it develops through a transcultural web of references that moves between her critical investigation into modernist and contemporary poetics, ancient and more recent healing practices, and the present-day cultural and political contexts in Greece, the United States, and elsewhere.
Through an intersectional methodology that is articulated in dialogue with anticolonial, anticapitalist and antiableist perspectives, Stecopoulos’ work draws from the chthonic and the autoethnographic to navigate the intuitive, discrepant, and omitted convergences between medical, political and poetic practice. In other words, her poetics of healing attempts to propose a different understanding of diasporic imaginary and of genealogy itself, while bringing various unspoken and erased affinities into dialogue. It is through this recognition of multiple lineages that Stecopoulos’ poetics of relation4 enacts a radical movement across languages and places, not in spite of her writing’s engagement with the lived experience of disability and chronic illness, but because of it: for aporia and impasse are approached as impetuses for solidarity, meditation and resistance against a broader uncertainty in the face of epistemic and medical violence.
Stecopoulos’ exploration of healing and diaspora foregrounds poetics as an incubatory practice, namely a latent form of inquiry that can undermine monolithic ways of representation and interpretation. As she writes:
Poetry, then, becomes the instrument of re-covering psyche through myth and image. It is actually poetry that keeps us from being whole, in the sense of fully uncovered—recovered—fixed. It keeps us in becoming. In incubation (39).
By incorporating passages of her upbringing as Greek American, Stecopoulos navigates how her relationship with Greek as a secondary, intimate language within her diasporic environment contributed to her interest in words as medicine, leading to the realization that language is “the most subtle and cutting treatment of all” (33). Her personal account of her connection with Greek unfolds across various contexts in which orality, tradition, music, poetry, family history, dance, mourning, and community coexist, retaining a distinctive embodied quality, alongside the presence of Greek in Western medical vocabulary which activated, for her, a particular, conscious way of thinking about meaning and origin:
This enlivening of a word as action made me feel that Greek always moved within the traffic of translation. Its plasticity lay not only in its own word formation and syntax but in the ability of anyone to shape thought with it (178).
Stecopoulos’ treatment of words as materiality and metaphor, or as “performative utterances,”5 to quote J.L. Austin, pays close attention to the somatic, oral, and oracular elements of language as it becomes evident across a series of critical examples, including the ones in the chapter “Translation as a Therapeutic Landscape,” where she attends to poetry’s therapeutic dimensions by recalling that, after her father’s loss, she and her mother “found vitality through translating Greek poetry into English” (201).
Through the usage of Greek words and phrases throughout the book, which complements her healing vocabulary, Stecopoulos’ writing unearths language’s traceable inner wisdom, as if the terms derive from language’s subconscious to listen to the knowledge of its body, through concepts and meanings that draw from and expand on the writer’s own diasporic imaginary. This tactic allows for a nuanced analysis of how poetry materializes psyche and memory through language, revealing language’s impasses and breaches as prompts for pondering on the deeper, obscured spaces of healing. By attending to the practice of incubation and how “the dream is nurtured by the wound and born from it” (13), Stecopoulos’ premise shapes the stylistic and performative choices of her writing, which is inquiry-based and lyrical at once, operating through modes that are fragmentary, immersive, unbidden, revelatory, material, and introspective.
The presence of Greek words as epistemic and therapeutic points of reference, around which her poetics and politics of healing unfolds, creates a reassemblage of Greek medical terms that encompasses the diasporic, the hybrid and the aporetic: etymological origins and transformations of meaning make themselves visible through their archaic, symbolic and literal forms; aphorisms, critical musings, and poems alongside metaphors, idioms and Greek derivations emerge as displaced remnants that create a bilingual mosaic, altogether constituting the writer’s embodied poetics of healing. In this manner, the material and symbolic registers of ancient and modern Greek are being reconsidered, since words such as iamata, enkoimesis, symptoma, iatromantis, oneira, parodoi, stenochoria, pholia and a-patheia mutually inform one another within the text’s broader constellation of references and ethnomedical meditations, while being interrogated and redefined as indexes of opacity, performativity, imagination, cure, and displacement:
Words incubate words. Words hide other words, occlude them, send their eidola to appear to them (39).
Stecopoulos’ expansive perspective on healing as a holistic and conscious act of repoliticization is orchestrated in dialogue with her cosmological view on poetics in relation to a variety of urgent subjects, for which she draws from avant-garde lineages to elaborate on the poet as a suppliant, critic, shaman, dissident, and healer within modern and contemporary contexts.
Poetry is articulated as a sanctuary and pharmakon in her rigorous examination: building on the ground of modernist American poetry towards a transnational community of poets, she develops a rich critical account of experimental poetics, drawing and reflecting on the works of various poets from diverse geographies to guide us into poetry as refuge and abaton. From Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, to Raul Zurita, William Rowe and Phoebe Giannisi, as well as David Wolach, Hannah Weiner and H.D.—a poet who, as the writer eloquently puts it “offered her books as iamata” (39)— Stecopoulos persistently returns to poetry as an oracle and social practice that can revitalize our collective political vision. Her claim that “the poem has no etiology but the fact of its making” (313) encapsulates her view on poetry as survival, hope, and recovery of our collective self-determination.
Beyond a corrective framework of healing, Dreaming in the Fault Zone grapples with the struggles, impasses, frictions and crises within the biomedical system, to provide a new, innovative perspective for the field of medical humanities, while exposing the limits of dominant health culture. A monumental work that touches upon some of the most urgent critical questions of our time, it urges us to think, live and relate through healing differently, inviting us also to reconsider our readerly habits through modes of expansion and mutuality. Such a gesture can be ultimately read as a relational one, for it illuminates the personal as porous, and healing as the unveiling of one’s own porosity towards the world: “to write healing not as self-recovery but infinite extension to others” (4), the writer denotes. Stecopoulos’ poetics of healing is planetary, namely diasporic in its thinking, and grounded on empathy, prompting us to think: “why must empathy be predicated on resemblance? Perhaps the test of empathy is imagination, not recognition” (207). Most notably, Dreaming in the Fault Zone prompts us to heal through imagination and the common threads of our distinct words and dreams.
September 12, 2026
Caterina Stamou is an independent curator, poet and researcher, currently pursuing a PhD in the Department of English Language and Literature of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.
Notes
1. Eleni Stecopoulos, Visceral Poetics, Oakland: ON Contemporary Practice, 2016.
2. I invoke Charles Olson’s notion of the “open field” here to draw a connection between Stecopoulos’ engagement with experimental poetry lineages, and the embodied experience of reading and writing poetry. Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” Poetry Foundation,2009.
3. Rupa Marya, Raj Patel, and Aaron White, “‘Repair Is the Reimagination of Power’: Healing from the Injustices of Colonialism,” Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, no. 34 (Spring 2022): 124–37.
4. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
5. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words.Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975.