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.
Praise for A Wellness Check
“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.
