This suggestively titled collection of poems provides a lyric record of a physician’s way of seeing.The situations to which the poems bear witness are not only medical, though many are.Some are cityscapes into which are woven surprisingly astute observations of homeless people or hitchhikers or ducks in the park.Some explore the geography of a body where memories are held in “neuron chains.”Some articulate bits of personal history from the point of view of a woman who has spent years in medicine, caring for the elderly, seeing bodies with the double vision of a clinician and a person whose spirituality clearly informs all she sees.
Titles like “ER Alphabet of Hurt” or “Looking for God On the Radio” or “Hippocrates Voyeur” or simply “Scars” may give some sense of the range of focus.Her vision and voice are strongly local; those who know Marin County, north of San Francisco, will recognize the places that become the poet’s personal geography.Those who don’t will still see in these poems a sensibility shaped and refined by the knowledge that comes from deep habitation.
