Reviewed by Leah McNaughton Lederman
In It Could Account for the Panic, Liz Whiteacre invites readers to dive into the rabbit-hole that is life with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE). Leaping from pianist Meadow Bridgham’s personal experiences with a TLE diagnosis, Whiteacre guides us through its intricacies, from the disassociation between mind and body to moments of creative revelation, walking steadfastly towards naming, understanding, and coping. Throughout the collection the reader experiences cycles: breath, destruction and regrowth, chaos and harmony. The musical accompaniment composed by Bridgham gives the words an added layer of complexity, a rhythm at times dissonant and gasping, at times a smooth, harmonious exhale.
The opening poem, “my breath is fire,” describes the simple, biological keystone as a fraught, blistering process that strangles the speaker’s words—“my breath/silences.” And yet this poem’s placement at the start of the speaker’s journey indicates rebellion against the effects of TLE: they will not, in fact, be rendered voiceless. They are only just beginning.
But first Whiteacre must show us the eerie limbo in which the speaker exists, the poem “I move like a specter” using comparisons like “marionette” and “shadow” to describe the way the speaker navigates through halls that stretch “like taffy” and a staircase “that twists like putty in toddler’s hands.” It’s a ghostly, unsettling vision that the reader undergoes with them until at last their “senses wake, conjoin, engage.” This cycle repeats and we remain in step each time the speaker reels closer to a name for what they’re experiencing, and a peace with it.
Flowers and nature figure prominently as a guide in these poems, leading the speaker back to the path when TLE has set them adrift. Whiteacre describes its whirlwind onset in “electrical storms” in which the speaker is again breathless and helpless, launched from reality into a surreal cosmos where “everything’s creepy calm, ultra-vivid, cinematic.” The speaker is “hollow/like my childhood ball left for seasons under a pine tree.” There is strength in this reminiscing: their memories, though the seizures may push them beyond their grasp, still exist; they are guarded beneath nature’s deeply rooted sentinel.
The speaker wades through the memory insecurity of TLE in “attack,” wherein they work to rejoin the speaker’s mind and body. The poem is marked in footsteps and opening doors, a series of simple movements that each time prompts them to question them: “did I just step down that step?/one pace closer to home, to safety?” In their recovery of self, the speaker seeks nature once again, the final lines asking, in the negative, “Surely, I didn’t reach to pluck that leaf?”
Even a clinical approach to nature helps the speaker make forward progress. Navigating this at-times bewildering unknown, their first step must be a diagnosis. Whiteacre works towards this in “alone in fear,” listing doctors’ attempts at labels to denote the things that TLE is not: depression, panic attacks, night terrors. The speaker compares their own search to the Latin names of plants in “can we name this?” and vows to pin it down: “it takes patience, this discovery, & grit to endure the/naming, making it palpable.”
“down a rabbit hole” shows the speaker sifting through Google search results where they find vindication, the knowledge that the speaker and their condition are known, even if given in “impersonal prose.” The speaker is the small Alice, inundated with myriad facts that loom larger than themself; their new path leads them “towards curious/characters quietly sharing symptoms & stories.” The speaker’s determination steers them yet again, claiming the agency to host their own tea party, so to speak—a forum where other individuals with TLE can converge and share, “building foundations for self-discovery.”
The Alice in Wonderland reference is more than an analogy; Lewis Carroll himself had TLE. This deeply-felt connection to him, reaching across time to communicate his vision, creates a marked change in the speaker and a turning point in the collection, even more so when the speaker comes across Eve LaPlante’s theory that Carroll’s seizures played a role in the creation of Wonderland. Marveling at “his commitment to communicate/his curiosities: realities forged when time stands till & we seize, able to bridge a dimension between brain’s/interior & exterior,” the speaker resolves to take some control of their own symptoms. It is here that the speaker first addresses the reader directly, “I don’t know how to explain it to you,” and yet they are all the more driven to do so.
The speaker stops being an outsider lost in an unreachable place and instead sets themself apart as someone who can take their discomfort and their search for answers—their White Rabbit, Mad Hatter—and transmute them into incredible worlds made up of music. The speaker wants to reach those on the outside “to help you hear it, see it, feel it too.”
This is our introduction to the speaker’s art, the piano. They locate themself and much-needed quiet within the scales “—until softness. I can rest.” The pain does not leave the speaker, but they embrace their interiority, joining not just mind and body as they have long sought to do during their seizures and their aftermath, but now the speaker’s Self and their Diagnosis, their isolation from others and a rejection of their pity: “I give thanks for the storms, opportunity for/regrowth, the fertility that settles in, grows me stronger.” Nature has become more than a guiding force; the speaker has joined in with it to grow along beside it.
The eponymous poem plunges readers into a frenzied stream-of-consciousness where the theme of breath comes into play again, this time it’s the readers’: the driving pace of the poem and its resistance to enjambment leaves no room to inhale. The speaker punctuates their thoughts with versions of the question “Am I talking too much?” or “too fast?” It leaves one to wonder if it’s a self-conscious, anxiety-laden query or if the speaker simply wants to know if the reader is following along while the trail heats up.
The speaker’s insistence to communicate their interior space catches us in the whirlwind, challenging us to consider how we would fare if thrust “into a dream, trying to ride a dysphoric, euphoric, chaotic roller coaster, trying to follow disjointed details, forcing a narrative? Did you ever think about that? It could account for the panic that makes everyone pause.”
The words calm somewhat at the end when the speaker emerges from the breathless torrent with the observation, “I’m on an adventure with Alice. Just paused in a moment of indecision.” The speaker explains all of this, it seems, as much for their benefit as for ours, broadening our experience by bringing us into the speaker’s.
Like Alice, the speaker has choices. And it appears they must make them soon because in the next poem “triggers” the speaker reaches a point of anxiety, bordering paranoia, as they are unable to read the people around them. The speaker cannot touch, think, or move “without breaking.” Something has to change.
“resolution” brings some hint that perhaps, after a long-sought diagnosis and even longer struggle with TLE, the speaker is undergoing some type of treatment. They address the condition as one might a lover, missing its “unexpected love notes” and the way they set the speaker apart from others, made life unpredictable; they miss the artistic fervor and worries that in distancing herself from TLE they might be losing “my superpower, the muse to my art, my love.” Nonetheless, the speaker is taking their medicine—“I promise I have” and has made “lifestyle changes” to remain balanced.
The collection ends on a note of hope, indicated by the title of its final poem, “next season will be better.” The speaker describes their life and the length of time since their last seizure, during which time “like our garden, life’s been growing in coordinated/rows: blooms & harvests timed with sun sets.” No longer grasping at leaves or sifting through Latin names, the speaker has manicured the flowers, tended with the predictable rhythms of seasons. Although the speaker admits “on the horizon I see storms coming,” they have found their “ladybird,” an entity to hold her together, keep her on course. Together, they say, “we’ll learn from this, grow, & move on.”
Indeed, the readers have likewise learned and thus grown from this record of Temporal Lobe epilepsy’s impact. We have been led through Alice’s Wonderland and its overwhelming, uncontrollable extremes and reached safe ground, at least for now. It Could Account for the Panic is a project of naming; to name a thing is to know it, to learn it, to set its parameters. To share it.
Title: It Could Account for the Panic
Author: Liz Whiteacre
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Year: 2025
Read Liz Whitacre’s review of Cinnamon Fire in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Reviewer
Leah McNaughton Lederman has created two volumes of Café Macabre: A Collection of Horror Stories and Art by Women (SourcePoint Press, 2019; 2021) and her own short story collection, A Novel of Shorts: The Woman No One Sees (2020). Her creative nonfiction has been published in The River and South Review, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Defenestration Mag, and she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her essay “My Bleeding Heart” in the online anthology, What is and What Will Be: Life in the Time of COVID. In 2022, Leah published Beautifully Broken: The Katy Hayes Story about her cousin’s journey as a quadruple amputee. Leah founded and facilitates the Indiana Writer’s Center monthly online CNF group, and she works as the director of the Midwest Writers Workshop. She lives in the Indianapolis area with her husband and an assortment of children, cats, and dogs.