by Nicole Yurcaba
In Palaces’ Folktales for the Diseased Individual: Personal Essays, readers enter identity exploration, trauma, and everything in between. Brief in length yet visceral and visual in style, this collection of eight essays reads like the Baba Yaga revealing her innermost secrets and desires (that’s a compliment, by the way). Readers find twists and turns in every paragraph, and each revelation grows darker and darker, transporting readers to the outermost, nearly intangible edges of the human psyche.
The opening essay “They are Very, Very Sick People” depicts a precocious five-year old girl, described as “new: fresher dew on the curve of the earth than even most five-year-old girls.” The speaker is acutely aware of her differences: “I’m sure it was clear to others that I was an apparition.” The speaker’s otherworldly sense of self continues in this piece and sets the tone for the remaining essays.
In the age of social media influencers and the effects that social media has on particularly the self-esteems of females and female-identifying individuals, “Prettiest” is one of the collection’s most relevant essays. At the essay’s heart, too, is a discussion regarding basing one’s sense of self on others’ perceptions: “I’d dressed pretty because I’d thought Johnny really was.” It seems that the speaker continually bases their existence on the attentions of Johnny, a pansexual, who the speaker eventually sees “wasn’t good enough of a friend.” The essay’s most powerful line, however, is its final one: “Still, I was bummed I’d stopped getting all the pretty attention.”
“Home from School, Searching for the Man Who Will Kill Me” reads like a modern-day Lizzie Borden awakening on the cusp of her murderous intentions. The speaker bluntly asserts “I was a twelve-year-old who recorded Camp Rock songs on her MP3 player then worried she’d axe her best friend to death.” Again, the psychological horrors and paranoia that social media can bestow on a person become reality: “Text me all new Facebook notifications. Just in case something embarrassing came out about me during school hours (I’d still sprint home) (I still didn’t know what).” However, this essay blends the psychological with the religious as the speaker reflects “Whenever the cross on my nightstand wasn’t straight, it’d mean I might be the devil. If I did something my parents told me not to do, I also might be the devil.” Readers encounter an acute psychological and emotional decomposition unnoticed by the other characters in the essay. The parenthetical letter at the essay’s end, penned by someone named Abby, is snotty and accusatory, an example of the attitudes that make mental illness a stigma in society.
The beauty of this collection lies in its brutality. The author brings us into her world for alternating long and short periods. In short, what readers find is a cabinet of curiosities; the jars in the cabinets contain some of the most grotesque horrors, and yet readers cannot look away. This is a collection sure to haunt readers long after they have finished, and it is that haunting that will make them return to its pages time and time again.
Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian-American poet and essayist. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, is the recipient of a July 2020 Writing Residency at Gullkistan, Creative Center for the Arts in Iceland, and is a Tupelo Press June 2020 30 for 30 featured poet. Her poetry collection Triskaidekaphobia is forthcoming Black Spring Group in 2022. She teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and works as a career counselor for Blue Ridge Community College.
