The Ballad of Malady Nelson by Nicky Arscott and Amy McCauley is a poetry comic that builds with momentum, each panel swallowing the lines before it until a single sentence has grown into a catalogue of chronic illness, botched surgery, and care that never arrives. Its narrator is thirty-nine, living with her mother, and speaks in a nursery diction that makes abscesses, dressings, and discharge sound almost tender. Arscott and McCauley dress her in racecourse finery crowned with lungs and ribcages, then flatten her into decorative wallpaper before the book opens out onto rooftops and a burning globe. Against a backdrop of pandemic Britain, economic collapse, and neighbourly ritual, illness becomes both spectacle and domestic labour, and the ballad's mounting refrain starts to sound like an accusation.
 
PRAISE for The Ballad of Malady Nelson:
The Ballad of Malady Nelson is humorous, weird, mad, unsettling, original and unmissable. Once you start reading you're sucked into a world of wild illustrations and poetry that oozes imagination, wit and delicious absurdity. It's impossible to put down once you open it!
   — Astra Papachristodoulou
 
In The Ballad of Malady Nelson McCauley and Arscott have made a fabulously morbid infantile scatological grotesque lurid comical and brightly coloured recursive nightmare comic book about England, the pandemic, violence, decay and isolation. It’s an unbearable hotspot and linguistic contagion of feeling, oddly cheering for its grim-faced glee and determination to show-and-tell-it like it is.
   — Tim Etchells
 
ABOUT Nicky Arscott & Amy McCauley:
Nicky Arscott is an artist based in Llanbrynmair, Mid Wales who specialises in paintings and poetry comics. Her work has appeared in such publications as New Welsh Review, Nashville Review, Berfrois, and Ink Brick, and shown in such galleries as the Royal Academy, MOMA Wales, Oriel Davies and Sploj. Her poetry pamphlet Soft Mutation was published by Rack Press.
 
Amy McCauley is a writer based in York. She spends most of her time juggling the demands of functional neurological disorder, endometriosis and fibromyalgia. In 2016 she won a Northern Writers’ Award for Poetry.