The collection opens with a poem, "Dedication" (p.1), dedicating the poems that follow to those "dear friends" who share, and so understand, the sufferings of ongoing illness. The implication is that healthy people cannot, yet, truly enter that world and, in fact, "fear" those who must live there.  Yet Silver's poems are a way into that universe.  Tender and fierce, the poems in this collection seem to arise fully formed from the deepest part of Silver's existence. The poems in section I present us with the harsh realities of illness and the anticipation of loss.  In the acknowledgements, (p.72), the author notes that the poems in this section are "in honor of my sisters with inflammatory and advanced breast cancer." In "Advent, First Frost," she likens that "feathered prophecy" to "a bowl of frozen tears" (p.6) and in "Stage IV," she writes that she is "taboo, now," that she and others use words that once embarrassed them, "courage, prayer, miracle."  Even so, she is aware that "Our passports have been stamped-- / our wrists and collar bones have been marked" (p.7). In a lovely prose poem on page 11, she writes in memory of her friend, Susan: "Ulysses will sail the storms till he dies.  And so, my dear ones, will we" (p.11), combining, as she often does, the reality of approaching death with hope, dignity, and strength.  In "Leaving the Hospital" (p.23) and "On a Line from Virginia Woolf's Diary," Silver celebrates the return, even if temporary, to life: "And the day takes my body back simply, / the way a mother dresses her child" (p.14).  For me, the most moving poem in this section is the title poem, "I Watched You Disappear" (p. 22-23).  It is a litany of regret, loss, anger, and pain, related not in poetic images but in plain and deeply human language: "I hate spring, its prettiness. / Your heart kept beating. Why didn't it just stop?"

Section II consists of seven, short one-stanza poems based on images from Grimms' fairy tales. It seems that the first two lines of each poem serve as metaphorical statements about the realities of advanced breast cancer. "Owl Maiden" begins "No transformation's instant. / Her hair fell out first, replaced by quills" (p.29). "Strawberries in Snow" begins "Belief comes easily to the ill. / Miracles fall from their lips like gems" (p.31).  And "The Flowered Skull" offers these opening lines: "The magician finds them, young or old, / mothers, maidens--to him--no matter--" (p.34).  The final poem in this section is a tale told to her son, Noah.  In "The Hazel Tree," Silver is the mother who "died and grew into a tree," "each nut a word she'd grown to tell her son / now that her speaking human voice was gone" (p.35).