praise & reviews

“luna rey hall’s NO MATTER THE DIAGNOSIS is breathtaking. Every poem vibrates with visceral energy and authentic presence. They feel unique to this time, hall’s experience of their body, and this fragile age, but somehow also timeless and universal. Each piece is an exquisitely crafted visual and metrical wonder, connecting the reader to rhythms we know in our chests, and to the essential and enduring beauty that is art’s highest calling.”

— Michael Kleber-Diggs, author of Worldly Things

“NO MATTER THE DIAGNOSIS is an extraordinary rendering of hypochondria as an imaginative space. It shows us how illness, whether real or not, can be at once a monument (‘the pain commemorates the body’), a romantic partner (‘is this when you tell me you’ve never been with someone else?’), and a divine visitation (‘what is this impulse to worship all symptoms that find me’). We bear witness to the uncanny intimacies the speaker develops with medical professionals, and how desperately they want to feel seen by them: ‘please take my hand & show me where it should hurt.’ And yet, with tenderness and dark humor, the hall’s poems serve as a welcome balm for our fraught relationships with our bodies.”

— Nicky Beer, author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes

“The poet luna rey hall has gifted us a book that grapples with the body in peril—not only from the pathogens from without, but from one’s own stultifying fear of contagion. The poems of NO MATTER THE DIAGNOSIS cry and creak, weep and seep. At times, they are tender; at others, they are nightmarish, but they are always, always dynamic. This book reminds us of the inescapable fragility with which we navigate the world in bodies that are already disintegrating even as we, their immortal custodians, try to make meaning out of the harrowing experience of existing.”

— Destiny O. Birdsong, author of Negotiations