Bri Gonzalez

Praise for A Wellness Check“It’s like coming out all over again, minus / the guarantees I am still loved.” A Wellness Check is a revelation delivered via bipolar poetics. Madness takes the form of reflections and pop culture subversions, movie scripts and footnotes, collages and collapses. The reader is lucky to be along for the ride of intentional typography and delicious language. I want to hand deliver this book to every bipolar I know so we can sing A Wellness Check during our lowest lows and highest highs.”— SG Huerta, author of Last Stop and GOOD GRIEF“In these dark days of wellness culture™ and the isolating directives of self-care, Bri Gonzalez’s A Wellness Check wields deadpan humor in examining mental health topics typically reserved for the utmost seriousness. What I love most about this book is its unabashed indictment of the stories we tell about ourselves—from our penchant towards black-and-white superhero archetypes, to the stark lines that compose a diagnosis. This is a rare and refreshing book that upends the sieve of identity placed under clinical scrutiny—by institutions, by nationhood, by cultural imbrication under late-capitalist compartmentalization. What we encounter instead is not a way out, but a way into the mess. Of living. Of embodiment. Of disobedience. Of resistance to the static sutures of our lives that we so often find ourselves delicately bound. I love this book.”— Jessica Q. Stark, author of Buffalo Girl and Savage Pageant“Bri Gonzalez’s scintillating debut, A Wellness Check, explodes a self-identified villain’s bipolar diagnosis into a hybrid literary medley. Funny and gutting, musical and inventive, A Wellness Check lures you into the spiraling, magical mind of a person who makes a dramatized spectacle of illness, through which “everyone goes in solid and comes out crunched.” I wish I could travel back in time to give this book to my not-yet-diagnosed self also toggling between “fetaling on the ground… binging Cupcake Wars” and “TRY[ING] TO FUCK THE MOON BECAUSE SHE/HE/THEY HAVE TOO MANY FACES.” Bri Gonzalez gets it”. — Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca“In an utterly surreal and inventive hybrid collection, Bri Gonzalez has created an unflinching, visceral look at mental disorders. A Wellness Check is all-consuming and intense and transforms from page to page as the speaker goes ‘soaring and crashing.’ Gonzalez’s vulnerability and honesty is inescapable and burns bright.” — Jenny Sadre-Orafai, author of Dear Outsiders