Published in Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin. May/June 2023, pp. 25-26.

This review of Michael D. Snediker’s Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) highlights the book’s lyric and rigorous exploration of figuration, chronic pain, and queer embodiment across a hybrid archive ranging from Melville, Dickinson, and James to Sedgwick, Scarry, and Bersani. Snediker interrogates how pain both resists and necessitates figuration, advancing an approach that dislodges metaphor in favor of chronicity’s durational and material force. Attending closely to Dickinson’s ocular troubles and lyric temporality, Yates highlights how this study challenges phenomenological and normative accounts of embodiment, reimagining chronic pain as a lived representational conundrum. The review underscores Snediker’s contribution to disability studies, queer theory, and literary criticism, while noting both the demands and the generative possibilities of his stylistic-theoretical method.