My Books
"Melancholia. Witch hunt. Sinking spell. Mass panic. The diseases that chase us down. The scrupulous craft of them. A poetry that doesn't let go. "A textbook case." The Plath-like sharpness and blinding clarity. Peggy Munson's Pathogenesis is rich, powerful, and strange, possessed of a stylistic brilliance and extraordinary humanism." Gillian Conoley, NEA Fellowship and Pushcart Prize Poet
Pathogenesis
"Munson is a stylist extraordinaire and the story she tells here will leave you wide-eyed, spent, unnerved. You have been warned."
Rebecca Brown, Genius Award Winner, Seattle's The Stranger
"Origami Striptease reads like William S. Burroughs and Djuna Barnes howling at a brutal paper moon." Susan Stinson, Mid-Career Novelist Award winner, Lambda Literary Foundation
"It's a good, dirty book." Eileen Myles
Origami Striptease
“A courageous collection of captivating stories. . . . Provides a bold rebuttal to the many myths, criticisms, and skepticism surrounding this disease. . . . should be read by both lay persons and medical practitioners.” Journal of Pain and Palliative Care Pharmacotherapy
"This is a book that leaves you changed after you’ve read it, it’s so powerful and compelling." Jodi Bassett, Hummingbird Foundation for ME
Stricken: Voices From the Hidden Epidemic
An erotic road movie from America, dark, in powerful poetic language. Peggy Munson fascinates with her unusual poetic power, her images and metaphors. Readers hardly notice anymore that gender is not what it seems.
"... her writing is incredibly strong and imaginative, rough, explicit, wonderfully irritating and disturbing." Reviewers in the USA compared the author to Djuna Barnes, Jeanette Winterson and William S. Burroughs. – Translated Quotes from Amazon
Die Nacht, als sich die Welt aufloste
More On Pathogenesis
"Peggy Munson is speaking out of the void. Her language is cutting-edge and ontic, her subject matter shatters convention. This poetry is wise beyond any years - it truly transcends mere time. It is free from a lot of the burden of contemporary poetry conventions, and exists like a small island in the fiery sun, alone, yet willing to be utterly beautiful, utterly strange, and utterly itself."
Noelle Kocot, NEA Fellowship-Winning Poet
"Peggy Munson’s Pathogenesis is forthright and magical in its scope. The minute ascends to the monumental—moth to God; very little escapes the sharp, perceptive eye of this thoughtful poet. A sober music gives shape to the insistent pulse of this book, and each poem dovetails to highlight the collection’s overall vision. Every trope is a probe that divines vicissitude." Yusef Komnyakaa, Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet
"Peggy Munson's intriguing, kaleidoscopic poems transport the reader into a tough- and tender-hearted world of blood, illness, medical authoritarianism, and stubborn life force. Here, 'illness is not metaphor,' but a presence, an atmosphere, a window into experiences to which no mortal, ultimately, is immune. These poems shine a much-needed light on these sick times." Gerry Gomez Pearlberg, Lambda Literary Award and Audre Lorde Award Winning Poet
"Recommended collection, Peggy Munson's Pathogenesis." A (Very Incomplete) Feminist Poetry Syllabus for 2011." MS Magazine Blog
On Origami
Striptease
"Origami Striptease is one-of-a-kind. This is a book that you experience rather than read." Patrick Califia, author of Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism
"Gerunds and genders refashion pens, pricks, and pussy in this picaresque and inventive tale." Jennifer Natalya Fink, author of Burn
"Vividly poetic. I couldn't resist lying around my apartment all day, consuming every last bit of language that Munson laid out on the page." Chill Magazine
"A seductive, often raunchy fantasy of the disarming effects of love and trouble." Curve Magazine
"Munson deftly experiments with gender, linguistics, and style." Bay Area Reporter
"Munson is a poet at heart, and a master of the written word." Bay Windows
"This book reads like poetry and left me stunned with writer's envy." Erotica Revealed
More On Origami Striptease
"I've read Origami Striptease over two times now. I seriously never do that with books, which I suppose is indicative of its completely addictive nature, regarding both its content and its language. The narrative is woven together with palpable honesty, magical middle-of-nowhere landscapes, and a pulse iambic as one's own heartbeat, almost creating a whole new genre of poetic memoir-like fiction. Combining themes so often isolated in literature, including gender bending queerness, disability-induced isolation, complicatedly abusive relationships, and provocatively hot eroticism, the novel also stands to be a great teacher and activist, overlapping and adhering multiple realms much needing of such cohesion.
The narrator's voice is utterly luring, enticing the reader via the tip of her tongue to join her in her bizarre odyssey through desolate borderlands, icy interiors, and mind spaces crazier than acid trips. One of my favorite aspects of the novel is how matter-of-factly the story is told, even through some of the more surreal scenes involving poisonous pens, origami moose, and penny carnival cake walks. There's a dry cynicism but there's also an unjaded reality of longing, desire, and revelation. In fact Origami Striptease is a love story, only that its broken hearts have literal damage and that its chases for love run beyond time and location, bringing magical realism geniuses such as Jeanette Winterson and Michel Gondry to mind.
It's as if Munson is half-speaking and half-whispering the novel out loud, in a meter reminiscent of Poe's Tell-Tale Heart. I especially appreciate the voice of one of her characters, Jack, who consistently speaks Koan-like truths with a cadenced simplicity and candidness: "'Girls are a language I can only taste,' said Jack. 'I'm blind like that. You're extrasensory. . . . We only make religions out of things we cannot know.'" After reading Origami Striptease, I was not at all surprised to find that Munson is an accomplished erotic writer and poet, as well as a disability activist. The novel really is a merging of all three, and I hope that she continues to combine these indisputably honed forces in the future." My favorite reader review, from an Anon. User at Thriftbooks.com
Support Peggy's New Book
Peggy is working on a book about her experience of being left for dead by her family, the current state of affairs for ME/CFS, chronic Lyme, and Long Covid patients, and the American care crisis. If you want to help sponsor the completion of this project, please consider giving a one-time or recurrent monthly donation of any amount via Paypal using the Tip Me button.
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Writing the shadow spaces of ME/CFS, chronic Lyme, and Long Covid