Eat Me: Cannibalism and Regeneration in Lina Rydén Reynols’s Använd dem som du vill

Abstract This chapter examines cannibalism and bodily regeneration in Lina Rydén Reynols’s poetry collection Använd dem som du vill (2022) as figures through which ecological crisis, social collapse, and community are negotiated. Set in a dystopian agrarian society marked by famine and environmental degradation, the poems depict a female protagonist whose severed limbs regenerate and are offered as food to the starving collective. Drawing on Bakhtinian theories of the grotesque, feminist approaches to the female grotesque, and recent ecocritical work on the “environmental grotesque,” the chapter analyzes cannibalism as a ritualized, culturally mediated practice rather than as mere shock. The analysis situates the poems in relation to gift-giving, Eucharistic symbolism, agrilogistics, and posthuman conceptions of distributed agency. It argues that bodily regeneration simultaneously promises survival and exposes the violent logics of extraction and uneven distribution that structure the ecological crisis. Ultimately, the chapter shows how Använd dem som du vill mobilizes the environmental grotesque to stage an ambivalent vision of endurance, scarcity, and plenitude.