Borges Meets Madness: Zoé Mahfouz's New Chapbook Explores The Unseen Realities Of The Mind

(MENAFN- PR Urgent) > Borges Must Be Rolling in His Grave is a poetry chapbook by Zoé Mahfouz that blends myth and medicine to explore mental illness, from insomnia and anorexia to Cotard's delusion and body integrity disorder.

Borges Must Be Rolling in His Grave is a poetry chapbook by Zoé Mahfouz, recently published by Dancing Girl Press. The collection investigates mental illness as lived reality, moving through both widely recognized and rarely named conditions including insomnia, anorexia, Cotard's delusion, and body integrity disorder. Each poem enters a distinct psychic state, treating diagnosis not as spectacle but as ontology, something experienced, articulated, and endured.

Drawing from myth, medicine, and philosophy, Mahfouz's language is lush, defiant, and intellectually charged. Neurotransmitters speak, mythological figures haunt clinical spaces, and pain demands new grammars. The poems confront stigma, the limits of care, and the failures of language itself, insisting on testimony where silence has long prevailed. Mental illness appears not as metaphor alone but as an archive of unrecorded histories.

The chapbook is also an explicit homage to Jorge Luis Borges, imagining the library of madness not as a quiet asylum but as a burning archive of thought, memory, and revolt. In its cerebral layering and unrelenting intensity, Borges Must Be Rolling in His Grave offers a poetic reckoning with how we name the mind and how we survive its labyrinths. The chapbook is available here:

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