Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation
Camonghne FelixWhen Camonghne Felix goes through a monumental breakup, culminating in a hospital stay, everything—from her early childhood trauma & mental health to her relationship with mathematics—shows up in the tapestry of her healing. In this exquisite and raw reflection, Felix repossesses herself through the exploration of history she’d left behind, using her childhood “dyscalculia”—a disorder that makes it difficult to learn math—as a metaphor for the consequences of her miscalculations in love. Through reckoning with this breakup and other adult gambles in intimacy, Felix asks the question: Who gets to assert their right to pain?
Dyscalculia negotiates the misalignments of perception & reality, love & harm, & the politics of heartbreak, both romantic & familial.
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Camonghne Felix, poet & essayist, is the author of Build Yourself a Boat, which was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry, shortlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award, & shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Awards. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Academy of American Poets, Freeman’s, Harvard Review, LitHub, The New Yorker, PEN America, Poetry Magazine, & elsewhere. Her essays have been featured in Vanity Fair, New York, Teen Vogue, & other places. She is a contributing writer at The Cut.
Camonghne Felix on Twitter, 4/8/24: “Last Tuesday I found out that my book Dyscalculia was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein award. I decided to decline this recognition & asked to be removed from the longlist in solidarity with the ongoing protest of PEN's continued normalization & denial of genocide.”