Summary:

Like Hopper's famous "Nighthawks," this painting shows a brightly lit corner storefront as seen from the street in the darkness of evening. The drug store is clearly an "independent" pharmacy ("Silbers Pharmacy") and it advertises "Prescriptions--Drugs--Ex Lax."

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This etching illustrated a book criticizing (male) physician birth attendants--"man midwives"--today’s obstetricians. The etching shows a figure that is male on one side, female on the other. The male half stands on a plain wood floor next to a large mortar and pestle, holding an instrument labeled a "lever" in his hand, which is pressed against his thigh. The background seems to be a shop, with shelves lined with vials, bottles, and frightening looking instruments labeled "forceps," "boring scissors," and "blunt book."

In contrast, the female half of the figure stands in a homey room on a decoratively carpeted floor; in her outstretched hand she holds a small cup. Behind her, a fire burns in a grate.

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As the title explains, the painting depicts Rene Laennec, French physician and inventor of the stethoscope, in a hospital room, his ear pressed to the chest of a male patient, who is sitting up in his bed. In his left hand he holds an early model of the stethoscope. Three other figures appear to the back and right: one is likely another physician, another is a sister/nurse.

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This narrative poem relates the speaker's memory of neighborhood boys tying her and a friend "spread-eagled" to a garage door and teasing them in a way that borders on being sexually threatening. The speaker tried (and eventually succeeded) in convincing the boys to let her and her friend go. The poem subtly explores the shifting relations between girls and boys--and between girls and themselves--on the border of childhood and adulthood, focusing on the tensions of girls moving from seeming sexlessness to sexuality and womanhood, and the prices that might entail.

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This brief poem describes a revelatory conversation the speaker has with her dying brother "The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant . . . ." Her brother takes her hands into his, and asks if she really understands that he will die soon. The speaker assures him that she does, hinting at an inner acceptance the brother questions. He then turns the tables on her (and on the reader) by suggesting that what she really needs to accept is that she herself will die someday--and that until she understands this, she cannot really comprehend the reality of his dying.

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This book is a collection of photographs of patients and their family members, caregivers, administrators, and others in an Oregon nursing home. Photographs are accompanied by commentaries by the subjects, who talk about their lives, their suffering, their work, their survival.

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The speaker describes falling on the stairs and badly hitting her head--the nausea and dizziness she experiences frighten her, reminding her of the vulnerability of her body and the ever-with-us potential for tragedy. She recalls a friend who suffered a blood clot and had to be rushed to surgery and the details of her father’s last days.

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May's Lion is really two stories in one: the first is narrated by a woman who knew May, the story's protagonist, when the narrator was a child, and she retells the story May told her about the time a sick mountain lion came into her yard. Uncertain of what to do, she called the sheriff's office. Police officers shot the lion because, according to May, "there was nothing else they knew how to do."

The second story is the narrator's fictionalized recounting of May's story. In this version, May (now called "Rains End") finds the lion in her yard, and in spite of her own fear she believes he has come for a reason. She offers the animal a bowl of milk, and sings softly to soothe him. She realizes "He had come for company in dying; that was all." This she offers him, and the lion dies there in her yard.

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In Balsamroot, Mary Clearman Blew explores the life story of her beloved aunt, who has recently developed dementia. The memoir artfully interweaves the stories of the author's struggle to cope with her aunt's condition and find the best care for her; her aunt's past as revealed in newly discovered diaries; the author's reconciliation with her estranged daughter; her coming to terms with a broken love relationship from the past (spurred on by her discovery of a thwarted love in her aunt's past).

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The Giant's House is narrated by Peggy Cort, a young librarian in a small Cape Cod town in the early 1950s. She falls in love--and her life becomes inextricably tangled--with James Sweatt, a young boy who suffers from gigantism.

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