Is it possible to archive the invisible symptoms of an illness? Is the archive emotional?

Emmalea Russo's Wave Archive moves between essay and poetry while also pondering the mind-body connection and the unreliability of thought patterns and histories. Here, Russo invokes her own experiences with seizures, photographs and art-making, archival and indexical processes, brain waves, and the very personal need to document and store while simultaneously questioning the reliability of memory and language. Drawing upon the history of epilepsy in both ancient and modern brain treatments, Wave Archive disrupts and restores the archive over and over again, exploring the very edges of consciousness.

Emmalea Russo is an interdisciplinary writer and artist living at the New Jersey coast. Her work has appeared in BOMB and The Brooklyn Rail and she has been an Artist-in-Residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles. She is the author of one previous book, G (2018). She lives in Avon-by-the-Sea, New Jersey.

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“Throughout Wave Archive, Russo teeters on a verge. The zone where symptoms meet self is a tenuous one, one that resists direct gaze, one that can be seen only in motion. This is the role of the restless motion of Russo’s poetry: it is always arriving at and being repelled from an edge, which is the only place the self, sick and all, can be seen from.” —Full Stop

“You could call Wave Archive a project book, if you like, but you could equally well call it a deconstructed memoir, or a set of sketches towards unwritten essays in verse. Mixed genres have rarely sounded so good, or described an idiosyncratic life so well.” —The Yale Review