A Wellness Check — Bri Gonzalez
There, in the night sky, projected over city smog and ghost stars—the Rat Signal. Followed by the rev of the Ratmobile’s custom made engine and the inevitable slam of Asylum doors. Bri Gonzalez’s debut collection, A Wellness Check, snatches a beloved caped crusader and spins him on his head. It follows a recently diagnosed speaker under the care of Dr. Ratman—part-time psychologist, part-time vigilante who ratarangs his patients into submission. Alongside characters like Mr. Double-Side, The Quippler, and Clown Princess, the speaker must untangle their relationship with Dr. Ratman and their disorder. Through an amalgamation of hybrid prose, poetry, screenplays, and fragment essays, A Wellness Check jabs at pop culture's use of mental illness as shock value. Here, the experience of diagnosis is laid bare. Here, the joys and pains of clinical illness are interwoven with rat fists, diner coffee, crossword puzzles, plot twists, divinity, and the looming shadows of heroes that want us dead, or worse.
There, in the night sky, projected over city smog and ghost stars—the Rat Signal. Followed by the rev of the Ratmobile’s custom made engine and the inevitable slam of Asylum doors. Bri Gonzalez’s debut collection, A Wellness Check, snatches a beloved caped crusader and spins him on his head. It follows a recently diagnosed speaker under the care of Dr. Ratman—part-time psychologist, part-time vigilante who ratarangs his patients into submission. Alongside characters like Mr. Double-Side, The Quippler, and Clown Princess, the speaker must untangle their relationship with Dr. Ratman and their disorder. Through an amalgamation of hybrid prose, poetry, screenplays, and fragment essays, A Wellness Check jabs at pop culture's use of mental illness as shock value. Here, the experience of diagnosis is laid bare. Here, the joys and pains of clinical illness are interwoven with rat fists, diner coffee, crossword puzzles, plot twists, divinity, and the looming shadows of heroes that want us dead, or worse.
There, in the night sky, projected over city smog and ghost stars—the Rat Signal. Followed by the rev of the Ratmobile’s custom made engine and the inevitable slam of Asylum doors. Bri Gonzalez’s debut collection, A Wellness Check, snatches a beloved caped crusader and spins him on his head. It follows a recently diagnosed speaker under the care of Dr. Ratman—part-time psychologist, part-time vigilante who ratarangs his patients into submission. Alongside characters like Mr. Double-Side, The Quippler, and Clown Princess, the speaker must untangle their relationship with Dr. Ratman and their disorder. Through an amalgamation of hybrid prose, poetry, screenplays, and fragment essays, A Wellness Check jabs at pop culture's use of mental illness as shock value. Here, the experience of diagnosis is laid bare. Here, the joys and pains of clinical illness are interwoven with rat fists, diner coffee, crossword puzzles, plot twists, divinity, and the looming shadows of heroes that want us dead, or worse.
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
About the author
Bri Gonzalez is a queer, Chicane poet from San Antonio, Texas. More of Bri’s work can be found or forthcoming in Honey Literary, Crow & Cross Keys, Angel Rust, Talon Review, ERGI Press’ Trickster: An Anthology of Queer Mischief, Devil’s Party Press’ Solstice: A Winter Anthology, and others. Bri is a graduate of the Summer ‘23 Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and will receive their MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado Boulder in Spring 2024. In their free time, they smother their void cat, Dahlia, play excessive amounts of D&D, and swoon over fictional characters. Check Bri out at bgwriting.org.
