Showing 1 - 10 of 74 annotations contributed by Davis, Cortney

My Borrowed Face

Nigliazzo, Stacy

Last Updated: Jun-06-2022
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

"My Borrowed Face," Stacy Nigliazzo's third full-length poetry collection, contains 55 poems, presented as a continuous flow without division into sections. Once again, Nigliazzo's poems are spare, often only phrases or words scattered on the white page, a form that leads the reader's eye from one image to the next. (For a brief discussion of how this poet uses white space, see the annotation of her second collection, “Sky the Oar” on this database.)  The poems in this collection were written during the Covid pandemic; they speak of the toll the virus has taken and continues to take not only on patients but, in these poems, on the caregivers--specifically the poet.  Nigliazzo, an emergency room nurse who has worked through five pandemic surges, is the perfect narrator to take us along on her rounds.

The book's early poems look back before the pandemic ("5920 Days Pre-Pandemic," p. 11) and then they come closer ("30 Days Pre-Pandemic," p. 12), until they begin to chart, with stark imagery, the beginning and the continuation of the pandemic.  We walk with the poet / nurse as she ticks off the days from "First Sunday on the Ward, Pandemic," p. 15, through "575 Days Out," p. 41. 

The 16 poems that close the book are a rest, in a sense, from the pandemic.  These poems are individual reflections, like quick photographs, that capture a variety of observations both personal and professional. "Self-Portrait as the Pink Moon," p. 42, and "Blue Book," p. 43, hark back first to Nigliazzo's mother, pregnant with the poet, then to her mother's death.  In a way, circling this collection back to the beginning, birth and death, the never ending turning.

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Queen of the Sugarhouse

Studer, Constance

Last Updated: Sep-14-2021
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Collection (Short Stories)

Summary:

Constance Studer's engaging "Queen of the Sugarhouse" contains nine short stories ranging in length from 9 to 21 pages, each story complete in itself.  Her nursing expertise is evident in several stories, including "Mercy" (page 3), "Shift" (page 77), "The Isolation Room" (page 95), "Testament" (page 112), "Special Needs" (page 122), and the title story, "Queen of the Sugarhouse" (page 138). 

While many of the stories specifically revolve around medicine or nursing, others examine a variety of issues, often with healthcare peripherally involved. 

In "Shelter" (page 21), a homeless vet who served in the Gulf War struggles with PTSD, the difficulty of obtaining permanent disability, the inability to find work or a suitable living space, and his quest to find treatment for his many physical problems after chemical exposure during Desert Storm.  He sees a different doctor at each appointment and no one truly helps him. "Finding today's meal or bed or beer takes all my energy, leaving me nothing left over for thinking about next week.  I am a veteran and can no longer vote because I have no home" (page 27).  Studer takes us into this man's life and struggles with clarity and empathy.

"Think Beauty" (page 37) questions what makes a woman beautiful (or believe she is beautiful) against a back story examining friendship and all that entails.  "This Middle Kingdom" (page 58) tells a story that encompasses both the heroics of a ski team that saves skiers in distress and how difficult it can be to feel compassion for those who end up in trouble because they flaunt the rules or advice of the experts--a theme quite relevant for our times. 

The book's opening story, "Mercy" (page 3) explores a nurse's various reactions after she makes an error while dispensing medication. As in every story in the collection, multiple themes weave in and out, driven by a character's decision or dilemma.  In "Mercy," we see how medical personnel can truly care for and worry about their patients; how even a small error may cause a nurse deep distress, both for her patient and for her future; how the nursing shortage leads to burnout; and how "real life" continues on in the background, in this case, a passionate love affair that leads both to marriage and to grief.  "Grief is a train that doesn't run on anyone else's schedule" (page 15).

"Shift" (page 76) tells of a physician who is devoted to his work and his patients in the ER ("His white coat flaps, stethoscope bounces as the doctor runs, its weight a comfort, like a rosary for a priest" page 76) while his wife feels neglected.  The story moves between the chaos of the ER and the story of his marriage, a love that began when the doctor was in medical school.  After his wife leaves him, the doctor sleeps with the lights on, hoping she will return.  But whenever he closes his eyes, he only sees scenes from the ER.  The story ends with words the doctor has said so often to a patient: "Please sir, lie still.  I'm going to numb you now.  Hang on, man.  Soon the pain will be gone" (page 93). 

"The Isolation Room" (page 94) follows a woman, a writer, who has been, she believes, placed unnecessarily and mistakenly in a psychiatric ward.  As we read, we wonder if this woman is truly afflicted with a mental disorder or if she is simply extremely imaginative, perhaps betrayed by her husband who arranged for her admission. The main character is likeable, often seemingly sensible, perhaps incredibly but differently talented: "Maybe to be out of her mind meant she'd finally make the leap from logical to intuitive, into her true skin, a room all her own ... a writer, that teller of lies, pursuer of truth by means other than logical, that follower of breadcrumbs through the scary forest wherever they lead?" (page 97).

"Testament" (page 112) follows a student nurse in her first month of training and touches on the care of difficult patients, their various religious beliefs, and how healthcare providers' families are not immune to illness. "Special Needs" (page 121) follows Maria, a waitress with an unexpected pregnancy and wheelchair confined brother. The title story, "Queen of the Sugarhouse" (page 137) is a poignant examination of breast cancer; the terrible trial of chemo and radiation; the complex relationship between the suffering mother and her daughter, a nurse; and how life changes when the drama of uneasy but genuine love and relationship ends.  "I think I hear Mama's voice, then realize it's only the sound of water over rocks.  Tears are this river carrying me forward" (page 153).


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Freud on My Couch

Berlin, Richard

Last Updated: Aug-11-2021
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

Richard Berlin is the author of two poetry chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections.  "Freud on My Couch," Berlin's fourth full-length collection, consists of 46 poems divided into six sections, and a "Notes" section at the end.  As in his previous collections, Berlin writes as a physician, husband, father, friend, lover of music--and as a man who understands that he and his patients share a common and fragile humanity.

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Three Poems by Felice Aull

Aull, Felice

Last Updated: Jul-12-2021
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Poet Felice Aull has three poems in "Lullabies & Confessions," an anthology of poems about parenting published by University Professors Press. In her poems, Aull often bravely sheds her professional mantle to reveal personal experiences, deeply observed.

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Mercy

Montgomery, Judith

Last Updated: Mar-27-2020
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

"Mercy," winner of the Wolf Ridge Press Narrative / Poetic Medicine Prize, contains nineteen powerful poems--poems that provide an intimate look into the author's role as caregiver to her husband who is living with, and being treated for, liposarcoma.  But the poems in this small volume are not just about husband and wife.  Cancer becomes a third character, one who is often addressed as a presence lingering in the same house, sleeping in the same bed, never absent from every moment of struggle or from any moments of joy.  In the opening poem, "Cozy" (page 1), the couple has "escaped" to a remote rented cabin.  They slip "from love-rumpled featherbed and sheets" feeling "safe" within the sturdy cabin walls that "keep out driving rain or freeze."  For those hours, nothing can spoil their happiness, "even Cancer, who squats on our stoop, / flipping his gold coin in lazy arcs."  At the close of "Cozy," as the couple drives home from their respite, Cancer rides with them, sitting between them "as he hums and nods / pleasantly--first to you, then to me, // one hand lightly resting on each near thigh."  The author weaves this threatening image of Cancer as an ever-present entity throughout the poems that follow.

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A Time To Die: Monks on the Threshold of Eternal Life

Diat, Nicolas

Last Updated: Jan-21-2020
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Journal

Summary:

Nicolas Diat is a French journalist who, over the course of many months, traveled throughout France visiting a number of monasteries.  Because monks live their lives in many ways preparing for death, for eternity, Diat wondered if they had special insights about our final days on earth. "A Time To Die" contains a foreword by Robert Cardinal Sarah; comments by the author ("Extraordinary Stories); eight chapters, each the story of a particular monastery and particular monks; an epilogue; and closing remarks by the author.

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From Nothing

Krugovoy Silver, Anya

Last Updated: Jan-06-2020
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

There are 48 poems in this volume (the author's third full-length collection), divided into three sections.  The author's first book, “The Ninety-Third Name of God” introduced us to her family and especially to her diagnosis--inflammatory breast cancer--the disease discovered in 2004 during her pregnancy, the disease that claimed her life in August, 2018 when she was forty-nine-years old.

In her second collection, “I Watched You Disappear”  Silver's poems invited us to accompany her on her journey through treatment, anger, despair, determination, and faith. This third collection (her penultimate) continues the author's beautifully written illness narrative, again presenting moments of joy and of despair, and always of hope.

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I Watched You Disappear

Krugovoy Silver, Anya

Last Updated: Nov-21-2019
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

There are 46 poems in this volume (the author's second full-length collection), divided into four sections.  The author's first book, "The Ninety-Third Name of God" , introduced us to her family and especially to her diagnosis--inflammatory breast cancer--the disease discovered in 2004 during her pregnancy, the disease that claimed that claimed her life in August, 2018, when she was forty-nine-years old.  This second collection continues Silver's illness narrative, poems that might serve as a journal of her journey through treatment, anger, despair, determination, and faith.

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The Ninety-Third Name of God

Krugovoy Silver, Anya

Last Updated: Jul-25-2019
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

There are 46 poems in this volume (the author's first full-length collection), divided into three parts--the poems in the second section are in memory of women who have died of inflammatory breast cancer, the same disease that claimed the life of the author in August, 2018, when she was forty-nine-years old.  Diagnosed in 2004 during her pregnancy, Anya waited until after her son Noah was born to begin cancer treatment.  These poems, published in 2010, begin in images of her domestic life and her family, move forward to her cancer diagnosis (p. 17: "Biopsy"), and progress to examine, in poems that balance beauty and pain, what it is like to live with the knowledge of early death.  This awareness imparts a crystalline honesty and urgency to every poem. 

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Comfort Measures Only

Campo, Rafael

Last Updated: Nov-26-2018
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Physician Rafael Campo's collection of new and selected poems is a lovely look back (selected poems are from 1994 to 2016) and an exciting look at thirty-one new poems that continue his trademark use of a variety of poetic forms (the title poem "Comfort Measures Only" is a Villanelle, pg 135) and the moving and personal examination of his interactions with patients.   This collection begins with Campo's excellent introductory essay, "Illness as Muse" (pgs 1-9).  

As the essay opens, an audience member tells Campo that his poems are "really depressing." Even Campo's spouse advises him to lighten things up, a counsel I hope the poet never heeds--for it is precisely Campo's unwavering examination of sorrow, regret, death, and despair that set his poems apart from poems that find "butterflies or snowflakes or flowers as more suitable." Campo responds: "Try as I might to take all of this concern to heart . . . I keep finding myself drawn to write about illness" (pg 1).

Campo recalls how singing and praying consoled his grandmother and seemed to lessen her physical ills: "No wonder I have come to believe in the power of the imagination if not to cure, then to heal" (pg 4).  On page five he notes "To write about illness, to heed this terrible muse, is to reject distancing and to embrace empathy, for which there is no reward or claim on greatness other than perhaps the perverse joy of recognizing oneself as being susceptible to the same foibles and neuroses as anyone."  Indeed it is this vulnerability--the ability to see physician and patient on the same plane, as equal players in a moment in time--that has become another hallmark of Campo's poetry. Selected poems from previously published collections follow the essay: nine poems from "The Other Man Was Me" (1994); eight poems from "What the Body Told" (1997); nine poems from "Diva" (200); five poems from "Landscape with Human Figure" (2002); seven poems from "The Enemy" (2007); and twenty poems from "Alternative Medicine" (2013).  Of these collections, all but "Landscape with Human Figure" and "The Enemy" have been reviewed in the database.

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