Hand Me the Limits

Overview

Hand Me the Limits attacks the taboo subject of illness and healthcare in our American dystopia with the grit, style, and panache that only Ted Rees could muster. Through a hybrid mix of memoir, experimental lyric, and essay, this Lambda Literary Award finalist tells us the story of losing a part of himself to cancer—and plumbs the deep, existential conflicts and emotions that such a loss presents to a queer dissident. Rees has long been a sly prophet of doom, insisting that this infected world must change or perish. Hand Me the Limits asks: what happens when you witness a loved one succumbing to disease? What happens when you, too, succumb to disease? You find yourself on the other side of reality in a domain ignored and scorned by polite society, suffering loss of dignity on top of potential loss of life, limb, and hole. Rees rejects traditional cancer narratives, approaching themes of sickness and healing through the lens of his youth as a wayward, salacious crust punk with anarchic values and a killer taste in music.

Author Biography

Ted Rees is a poet, essayist, and editor living and working in Philadelphia. He is the author of Dog Day Economy, Thanksgiving: a Poem, and In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame. His essays have been published in The Back Room, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk, Full Stop Quarterly, and ON Contemporary Practice’s monograph on New Narrative. He is Associate Editor for The Elephants, as well as founder and co-editor of Asterion Projects with Levi Bentley.