“Somatic practice for those who wake up afraid”
Griffin Epstein
Artist Statement: As both a mental health practitioner and a person who has consistently utilized therapeutic and psychiatric resources, I explore the concepts of madness and the ways contemporary language and discourse around mental health and healing can be both personally transformative and profoundly reinforcing of / entrenched in / further entrenching interlocking forms of social oppression. As an educator, researcher, and a poet complicit in systems of white supremacist, capitalist, colonial, heteropatriarchal and ableist violence, I am always also interested in accountability, agency, and the need to both acknowledge and work beyond the fiction of the individual self.
Don’t move / too fast
Listen to the wind
Which could dismantle the house brick by brick
if it wanted
If the wind had wants
After years of being told get up get up we have to go
It’s hard to remember you can take your time
You’re grown
No one in this world is peerless
or pristine
Unfuckable or
Completely Fucked
Nothing’s for sure except
you are stuck
With this life
In this sharp corner of the universe
So breathe, breathe in
Make a coughing sound
Like an old computer starting up
Grunt
into the day
Until the day
Grunts back
Griffin Epstein is a non-binary white settler/occupier from NYC (Lenape land) working in education and community-engaged research in Toronto (Dish with One Spoon/Treaty 13). They have been featured in Glad Day's Emerging Writers Series, and their poetry has appeared in CV2, Grain, The Maynard and Plenitude, among others. griffin is the author of the chapbook so we may be fed (Frog Hollow Press, 2021), and member of the experimental videogame collective shrunken studios. They also make music and develop multimedia work.
website: https://griffinepstein.com/
twitter: https://twitter.com/whyputer