Novel poetic protest: What Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist offers geographers writing to evoke rather than convey

This paper is a call to geographers, a call for evocative understandings of complicated places and times, for writing practices that foreground feelings, embrace experiential considerations, and privilege embodied relationships with text during periods of struggle, protest, and resistance. I anchor this call in a formalist reading Sunil Yapa's Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist. Drawing from poetic impulses, my formalist reading of the novel includes attention to the novels' grammatical structures and lineated assemblages: I extend my reading of the novel into a call for geographers to experiment and emote in our writing practices, whatever those practices might be. The paper also draws on poet Don Paterson's writing about textual work done by the lyrical and the lyric. Paterson suggests poetry offers opportunities to make writing an ingestible project, one with the potential of being physically manifest in a reader. In this paper, I suggest there is much potential for social change if geographers consider emotionally evocative writing and knowledge as opposed to information being conveyed in expected forms. Ultimately, and circling back to Yapa, I call to geographers to consider our writing as activist work, with the emotional potential of making a new and better world.