Anna Journey’s second book takes its name from an exhibit at L.A.’s Museum of Jurassic Technology called “Vulgar Remedies: Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition.” The exhibit comprises folk cures and rituals predating modern medicine; the poetry collection features hypnotic fabulations on memory, fauna, and the body. At times tender and anecdotal, others grotesque and nightmarish, Vulgar Remedies explores the boundaries that divide—or fail to divide—the past from the present, the dead from the living, and the self from the object of its love. If these poems are remedies, they treat symptoms of heartbreak, pubescence, and the vertiginous business of being embodied.
