What does it mean to differentiate—to diagnose, to be diagnosed, to have a diagnosis?

cells, fully differentiated is an account of non-diagnosis, an experiment in mining memory and parsing trauma in an ultimately failed attempt to construct narrative. Against a backdrop of social and economic precarity, the narrator's effort to understand becomes cyclical. As medical test after medical test result in the same lack of conclusions, memories loop over one another—and still, no cause can be determined.

cells, fully differentiated struggles with the idea of pathologization as metaphor: what it means to be sick, and to be perceived as sick. Fully differentiated cells are cells that have been defined, but also cells that have an explicit role in the functioning of the human body. If understanding and diagnosis are in service of the larger structures of late capitalism, then ultimately cells, fully differentiated rejects that understanding.

Kinsey Cantrell is a Brooklyn-based poet. Her work has appeared in Protean Magazine, Puerto Del Sol, Apogee Journal, SICK Magazine, Booth, Hayden's Ferry Review, Black Warrior Review, New Delta Review, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She studied epidemiology and biostatistics at the City University of New York. She has also written for the indie video game Sun Doesn't Set. cells, fully differentiated is her first book.

"Kinsey Cantrell's cells, fully differentiated is at once deeply felt and deeply intelligent, giving us a mind wrestling with the ramifications of the body's illness like Jacob with his proverbial angel. Cantrell works the page like a scientist, a dancer, and a latter-day Pollock, and takes us through cell maturity and cell death, looping uncertainty and longing, capitalistic medicine and its own pathologies, with a speaker who wants ultimately the simplest of things: 'what i want is not impact / but velocity / waking up to you with morning.'" — Sarah Thankam Mathews

"Kinsey Cantrell's brave, brilliant book cells, fully differentiated is a lesson in how to live when nothing works, not even the body. When you're chronically ill, the usual means of survival are strained: wages, credit, even love relationships. Tests, pills, insurance claims, sweat, bruises aggregate to create a medicalized entity, equally corporeal and corporate. The individual with illness becomes a data set, pinned down and gridded out like Cantrell's sectioned, fragmented poems. But illness is not a problem solved at the individual level. As Cantrell says, 'if self-actualization is the goal, it's a terrible goal.' So the tender, broken, searing voice of these poems seeks instead to breach the cellular boundary, to care and be cared for, to push past the grid while we still live here, to make it work." — Catherine Wagner

"'Everything is short-lived,' Kinsey Cantrell notes in her rending, beautiful cells, fully differentiated. Here, against the 'reek of sheets,' we have a series of circles, cycles, and cumulations, a resistance to pathologization and to capital itself. These formally inventive, heartbreaking, but never fragile poems live in the space between unknowingness and kinship, asserting a sick life powerful in its resistance to work and to working alike. Instead of either, there's just the work of the book—anxiety loops, reiterative symptoms, and endless pushbacks to doctors and other authority figures. It isn't a dismissal of the intensity of the work to say it gave me life. As she repeats throughout the collection, 'there are so many of us,' after all." — Zefyr Lisowski