The Thoughts

By Sarah Barnsley

An assured and inventive debut, The Thoughts explores different manifestations of intrusive thoughts as part of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) before navigating through the twists and turns of recovery and love. These poems inhabit therapists' treatment rooms, waiting rooms, and everyday documents, appearing in such varied forms as emails, research proposals and kids' puzzles. Compassionate and at times painfully humorous, The Thoughts is an act of advocacy, giving voice to critically underrepresented experiences of illness through poems that are as peculiar and creative as they are arresting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Poetry Business
• Release date: Dec 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781914914034

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The Thoughts

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Published 2022 by The Poetry Business

Campo House,

54 Campo Lane,

Sheffield S1 2EG

www.poetrybusiness.co.uk

Copyright © Sarah Barnsley 2022

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

ISBN 978-1-914914-02-7

eBook ISBN 978-1-914914-03-4

All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Designed & typeset by The Poetry Business.

Printed by Imprint Digital.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Smith|Doorstop is a member of Inpress

www.inpressbooks.co.uk.

Distributed by IPS UK, 1 Deltic Avenue,

Rooksley, Milton Keynes MK13 8LD.

The Poetry Business gratefully acknowledges the support of Arts Council England.

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After great pain, a formal feeling comes

– Emily Dickinson, poem 341

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss – we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain […] there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius, or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height […] And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the more impetuously approach it.

– Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’

Contents

Ruminations

Body Found in Garden After Confession

This Horse

Tainted Ode

The Fugitive

Does This Mean I’m a Steps Fan?

The day my brain broke

Compulsions

I come through the door like pest control

Private and Confidential

Drafts

I agree to read all the terms and conditions

Poem on Checks

Pure O

Avoidances

Contemporary Policemen in Their Homes

Section 3: Details of Project

Day two of sick leave

Safety-seeking Behaviours

Discuss the Past Twelve Years with Reference to One US Soap Opera

The Outsider

Magical Thinking

Virginia Woolf Has Fallen Over

My Stay in That Hotel Was Just Out of a Magazine

System Administrator

After being unable to tell the Samaritans

PhD Viva

Today You Went to Lunch with a Cave

Thought-Action-Fusion

Fear Brain

Prefrontal Cortex

Think of it in Terms of Geometry

The Other Side of