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.
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.
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.
These poems are not a cancer chronicle, but the experience of living with cancer is threaded through them in a way that illustrates beautifully how awareness of illness may permeate daily life, but is foregrounded and backgrounded, reshaped and revisited in shifting ways as it takes its course. They encompass moments in family life, moments in the hospital, moments of spiritual longing and awareness of loss. Together they offer a record of accommodation, acclimation, and complex acceptance.
