The Ballad of Malady Nelson

The Ballad of Malady Nelson by Nicky Arscott and Amy McCauley is a poetry comic that builds with momentum, each panel swallowing the lines before it until a single sentence has grown into a catalogue of chronic illness, botched surgery, and care that never arrives. Its narrator is thirty-nine, living with her mother, and speaks in a nursery diction that makes abscesses, dressings, and discharge sound almost tender. Arscott and McCauley dress her in racecourse finery crowned with lungs and ribcages, then flatten her into decorative wallpaper before the book opens out onto rooftops and a burning globe. Against a backdrop of pandemic Britain, economic collapse, and neighbourly ritual, illness becomes both spectacle and domestic labour, and the ballad's mounting refrain starts to sound like an accusation.