As part of Lit Society’s Book Review Program, members are reading and reviewing books by independent writers we think deserve more attention. This review reflects one reader’s honest experience and aims to spotlight exciting new voices.
Big Take? This poetry collection reminds me of Frida Kahlo in the best way possible. Like Frida, Jasmin Perdomo takes all of the heartbreak that comes with chronic pain and turns it into a work of art that is beautiful and devastating at the same time.
- Would You Recommend It? Yes
- Book Club Worthy? Yes
- Would You Read This Author Again? Yes
- Did It Change How You See Something? Yes
- Is It More Plot or Ideas? Ideas
- Pace: Steady
- Emotional Impact: Devastating
- Best For: Deep thinking, curling up with a book of poetry on a rainy day
- Skimmable or Demands Attention? Close Reading
- Would You Reread It? No (only because I don’t really read poetry)
I am so happy that I read Jasmin Perdomo's new poetry collection, bittersweet body: a poetic memoir, which was just published in May. It is truly a book that needed to be written. It arrives at a moment when the medical dismissal of women's pain has become a well-documented crisis, and Perdomo turns her own experience with that dismissal into something both devastating and beautiful. Right now, in the United States, women’s health concerns are often misdiagnosed or straight-up ignored, and Perdomo shows the human cost of what happens when our health is dismissed.
Every woman and femme I know is strong and resilient in many ways, and Perdomo’s poetry reflects that. bittersweet body traces Perdomo’s journey from vibrant, active health into a sudden, unexplained physical decline. The poems move through the disorientation of that decline, the isolation of not being believed, and the slow, nonlinear work of reclaiming a sense of self once a diagnosis and a path forward finally emerge. It's structured less like a traditional narrative with a single plot and more like an emotional timeline: readers move through denial, despair, small mercies, and eventual grace, always through the lens of the body as the site where all of this unfolds.
Each poem, each line, shows how medical gaslighting seeps into every corner of your life. Everything from love to getting out of bed to generational trauma is impacted when you are in chronic pain. Friendships that don't survive the confusion, a sense of identity that has to be rebuilt from scratch, a body that becomes both battlefield and stranger. The book is a quiet indictment of a system that too often asks women to prove their own suffering before it will be believed.
I'll admit upfront: I don't normally read poetry. It's not a genre I gravitate toward, but I knew as soon as I saw the synopsis that I wanted to read this book. These stories, these poems, are so important. Perdomo's prose has a clarity and warmth that pulled me in immediately, and I found myself moved in ways I didn't anticipate. bittersweet body is a book I'd recommend even to readers who, like me, think poetry "isn't for them," because at the end of the day, we all know what it’s like to be in pain, be gaslit for that pain, and then come out on top.
What makes this collection so interesting and brilliant is that it never settles for being a list of grievances and pain. The poems take years of physical collapse, fear, and medical frustration and transform them into language that is tender rather than bitter—which makes the title of the book even better. Her poetry includes images of the body as landscape, as home, as something worth grieving and worth loving again. The collection resonates deeply because it refuses to let suffering have the final word.
Favorite Lines?
I love this poem about generational trauma:
i find myself being just like them
the ancient men and women
that left behind their stories
of heartbreak
love
and disease
with a dash of poetry
i found myself
while writing through
the peaks and valleys
decoding parables
dry throat
cotton mouth
raspy voice when i speak
i thirst for living water
like the woman at the well
Also, I loved this line: “not all fears are created equal / some are stepping stones with many sequels.”
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