Stephen Barber on Zoo Hotel Delirium

FEM POEM – Romina Achatz in conversation with Stephen
Barber: The Death Zone, Sepsis, and the Return from
Hades



In this episode of FEM POEM, Romina Achatz speaks with author
Stephen Barber about his haunting and hallucinatory book „Zoo-
Hotel Delirium“, a descent into the borderlands between life and
death, written in the aftermath of a near-fatal sepsis.  The
book will be published next year in May 2026 by Infinity land
press, London. The conversation begins with the body: with sepsis
as both biological catastrophe and metaphysical rupture. Stephen
Barber describes the moment when the body becomes inhabited by
death — when tissue turns necrotic, when consciousness begins to
fracture, and yet the mind persists in dreaming. Together, they
explore how this “death zone” became a geography of its own — a
space where the author’s feverish visions unfolded: a brutalist
tower in the northern forests, a cursed city, the volcanic
mountains of Japan, and a Butoh dancer entering death’s stream.





Romina Achatz and Stephen Barber move between medicine,
philosophy, and art — tracing how the capacity to dream intensely
after sepsis can open another kind of perception, where
hallucination becomes revelation. Remarkably, both Romina Achatz
and Stephen Barber survived sepsis at the same time in their
lives- and therefore founded „The Sepsis dreamers club“. Now,
they share not only an experience of physical vulnerability at a
moment in life but a heightened sense of dreaming, a sharpened
sensitivity to presence, and a deeper resilience than before.


Their dialogue touches on Deleuze’s notion that the artist must
descend to Hades and return bearing something of that underworld
— as well as on the contemporary machinery of death, the politics
of dying, and the persistence of life even inside collapse.


What unfolds is less an interview than a shared passage — an
intimate mapping of the line where death begins, and happiness,
creativity, and art continue.