Summary:

A man begins to lose his word-finding abilities, his ability to perform everyday activities and his ability to communicate with his wife. He realizes his growing losses and incapacities. Even as he worries how to make amends to his wife, he grows distant and isolated. The poem ends with a vivid scene: the man stands in front of the woodpile with the axe raised--he looks at but does not recognize his wife screaming behind the closed bay window. "[H]e never / hears what it was she never said."

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Summary:

The first poem in this chapbook ("Sonogram") contains two images of a small, mysterious life (the fetus imagined as a "white boat on whiter water" and as a "tiny orca") in the midst of the coldly technical medical world. This juxtaposition is characteristic of B. A. St. Andrews's poems in this small collection. In most of them, she uses disciplined and sparkling language to explore the interface between modern medicine with its impersonal machinery and the irreducible mystery of life.

Some of the images are simply breathtaking. For example, in "A Dying Art: Room 309," a terminally ill artist lies in bed, surrounded by "plastic bags that hang / like udders dripping pigment / into her." In a love poem called "The Body of Science," the poet confesses, "Each time your voluntary / muscles make contact / my involuntary ones / contract." And at the end of "Alzheimer's," she observes, "She stood at the big bay / window screaming but he never / heard what it was she never said."

The four poems entitled "Your Breast a Unicorn" consider the fate of breasts attacked "at consolation's center" by "one aberrant cell metastasized." These learned, wise, and witty poems are, in my opinion, among the very best of the breast cancer genre.

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Summary:

Two metaphors permeate this poem about drinking a barium containing liquid prior to fluoroscopy to determine cancer growth and staging. The first metaphor involves the liquid as alcohol and the radiology suite as a rather perverse bar. Hence the patient drinks the proffered liquid which "froths and hisses like volcanic vodka / or martinis by Dr. Hyde." The second metaphor is 'cancer is war.' The body is seen as a battleground in which the "army of metastasizing cells / advances, armed and dangerous." The patient realizes that medical interventions are allies in this fight, but drinks the barium "as Socrates / must have: one eye on the door."

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