Summary:

This three-part collection of poems offers powerful images and vignettes from the life of a family practitioner living and working among the urban poor. The first section is the most explicitly medical in theme, including poems that pay painful tribute to a mother after stillbirth, a hydrocephalic child, an addict covered with boils, a young man murdered at eighteen, an old man with a failing heart.

The second section weaves images from the writer's personal story together with those from his life as physician, and the third focuses primarily on life lived as a gay man among the sick and dying, patients to be treated and friends to be mourned while life remains to be claimed and savored.

Despite the pain and grief attested to in many of the poems, a lively voice of clarity, compassion, and consent to the goodness of life even on hard terms gives the collection a defining note of celebration. Pereira's lines about a bereaved Cambodian seamstress suggest something true about his own work: ". . . she joins the circle / of other Khmer women to sew. / Punctuating the fabric / with yellow thread, finding her remnants / into a piece that will hold." ("What is Lost")

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This collection by a physician-poet covers a wide spectrum in topic and tone. The poems in the first of the four sections speak in voices of those waiting surgical outcomes, those whose loved ones are about to undergo invasive and dangerous procedures, those who are coming to terms (partly clinical terms) with death. The poems in the second section focus more explicitly on Jewish experience, and on experiences of suffering that take place in the wider context of biblical tradition and recent history.

The third section features lighter-hearted poems, many rhymed, that make playful reference to moments in domestic life and relationship which, while not free of suffering and anxiety, are also the stuff of laughter. The fourth focuses on love--erotic, romantic, familial--and death, which includes the ordinary losses that living through time entails. Elegiac, wistful, musing, and poignant, they end the collection in a complex, sustained key that holds an elegant tension between sorrow and hope.

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In these selected works of the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen--ranging from his early sound experiments through his more overtly political poetry to his final works--the Afro-Cuban experience of everyday life and its socio-historical and contemporary political underpinnings are constants. From slavery on to the natural and urban settings of Cuba, to the international places and communities of poets, politicians and activists shaping contemporary Cuban life, to the twinned invasions of Cuba by soldiers and tourists, and to the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Guillen portrays a life where everything, including love, is colored by suffering and rebellion.

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The title of this collection of poems recalls the formulaic statement by which a physician introduces a patient's medical problem or chief complaint. For example, "The patient presents with a history of fever, abdominal cramps and diarrhea for the last 24 hours." Or, "The patient presents with a long history of hypertension and diabetes." In this case, though, Dr. White's patients' presentations are poems, rather than chunks of sanitized medical jargon; and, while the patient remains a key character in most of these works, they also present the doctor's story.

Domestic violence, child abuse, and sexual abuse figure prominently in these poems. In "365" (p. 1) a five year old girl presents with "a foul smelling vaginal discharge"; she was a victim of rape. Baby "John Brown" (p. 9) has 47 fractured bones and was "dipped in boiling water" for soiling himself. In "Ironing" (p. 18) a first grade girl has the impression of an iron burned into her thigh. And the two-year-old girl in "Peek" (p. 49) is admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) with cigarette burns and a liver fracture.

Dr. White also writes of babies left behind by their mothers ("Autumn Angels," p. 3), homeless mothers and children ("Numbers," p. 42), and complex multigenerational family pathology ("Riddle," p. 50). All in all, these stories carry the reader very close to "Looking at the Gates of Hell" (p. 32).

Yet, a still, small voice of calm, maybe even of salvation, can appear in the most unlikely places. In "Belly" (p. 4) the physician lays her face against a baby's belly and "the warm brown skin calms my forehead. / All stiffness melts." In "Maplewood & Greene" (p. 36) she revels in seeing "three little girls on roller skates." And in the Whitmanesque poem called "Oh" (p. 45), she gloriously affirms, "Oh to laughter, oh to sorrow / Oh to a better day, oh tomorrow."

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This is a collection of poems that ranges widely through both the geographical and spiritual worlds. Susan Rich began her career as a human rights activist and Peace Corps volunteer in Niger. She has also worked in South Africa, Bosnia, Gaza, and as a program coordinator for Amnesty, International. Her poems are lyrics of empathy, discontent, and hope, unified by her "Cartographer's Tongue."

From an international medical and health perspective, some of the best of these poems are "Haiti," "The Woman with a Hole in the Middle of Her Face," "In the Language of Maps," "The Toughest Job," "The Beggars," "Sarajevo," "La Verbena Cemetery," "Whatever Happened to the Bodies," and "The Scent of Gasoline."

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In this collection, Judith Arcana brings together her long-standing feminist activism, especially for reproductive health and abortion rights, and her gifts as a poet. Although Arcana's activism dates back to the early seventies, most of the poems in the book were written between 1998 and 2004. They draw from "the lives of women and girls I know or have simply encountered" (xi).

The collection is divided into four sections: "Separating argument from fact," "Information rarely offered," "Don't tell me you didn't know this," and "Here, in the heart of the country." Spoken in first, second, or third person, these poems evoke the myriad individual situations in which women of childbearing age become pregnant, and the trajectories their lives may take as a result.

The title of the collection derives from one of its poems ("What if your mother") and the related, immediately preceding poem, "My father tells me something, 1973" (6-7). Arguing back to those who confront her with, "What if your mother had an abortion? . . . they mean me," the speaker/poet answers, "then I say she did . . . . "What if, what if. / What's the point of asking this phony question?"

From the preceding poem, the reader has learned, along with the speaker listening to her father in 1973, that the poet's mother had an abortion in the Depression era, early in marriage. With this juxtaposition of poems we are introduced early in the book to the complexity of the issues surrounding pregnancy, parenthood, and abortion and to the timeline of a continuing national and personal debate. This complexity is the subject of the collection.

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This collection of 116 poems by 76 poets includes a wide range of perspectives, although most are written about a friend or loved one with AIDS or by a poet with AIDS. The poems are about love, loss, grief, pain, fear, beauty, illness, death, and transcendence.

Some well-known poets, such as Adrienne Rich, Paul Monette, James Merrill, Philip Booth, Robert Creeley, and Marvin Bell have contributed to the anthology. Brief introductory essays by The Rt. Reverend Paul Moore, Jr., Joseph Papp, Carol Muske, and the editor comment on the power of the voices, the politics of AIDS, and the elegiac quality of many of the poems. Michael Klein likens the book to the patchwork quilt of the NAMES Project, and hopes that the book, like a "well-made" quilt, will "last awhile, keep you warm."

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In his third collection, Campo presents visceral poems that grow organically from the body: his own body and the bodies of patients, lovers, family, and friends. He doesn't write about being a gay physician of Cuban background--rather he crafts poems that address pain, love, and memory within a metrical framework so seamlessly that readers might feel they are healing, seeking, and singing alongside him.

Outstanding poems include "Sonnet in the Cuban Way," "The Return," "The Dream of Loving Cuba," "Madonna and Child," "Baby Pictures" (a prose-poem sequence), "A Poet's Education," "The Changing Face of Aids," and "Recognition." Section V, "Lorca," gives us Campo's translations of Federico Garcia Lorca's Sonnets of Dark Love.

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This is the first full-length collection by pediatrician and international health physician Roy Jacobstein. These 40 poems engage a wide range of topics, settings, and tones, but all demonstrate the same fine craftsmanship and strong voice.

Among the most engaging of Jacobstein’s poems are those dealing with memories of childhood and adolescence. Consider, for example: “Mr. Gardner in 10th grade told us there was no purpose / to mitochondria, only function.” (“Atomic Numbers,” p. 5). Or, “What transgression made fat Mr. Handler / drop his towel, his gloves, everything… to chase you from one end / of Fullerton to the other?” (“The Lesson,” p. 30) The poet displays a delightful sense of humor in pieces like “Bypass” (p. 36) and “Squid’s Sex Life Revealed in USA Today” (p. 59). Poems with explicit medical themes include “Pre-Med” (p. 6), “Admissions” (p. 8), and “What It Was” (p.11).

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In Especially Then David Moolten discovers his poetry in the ordinary, often painful, texture of childhood, adolescence, love, and marriage. Each memory becomes a small story-like poem that looks simple and straightforward at first, until suddenly the poem reveals its hidden truth.  A sense of existential loss pervades these poems, as in “One morning as a man’s wife offers to fill / His empty bowl he feels suddenly desolate / For how plain he has become…” (“Cornflakes,” p. 31)  But Moolten’s melancholy is sweet, rather than bitter; energized, rather than depleted; and cumulatively powerful, as “The tractor / Of memory drags on, churning its femurs, / Its numbers and dates.” (“Verdun,” p. 64)

Especially Then is ripe with traumatic events: A father’s abandonment, “During that proud, petulant year my father left / And I became a punk, nothing could touch me.” (“Achilles,” p. 17). A brother’s death: “in the shallow dark of years since / I buried my brother…” (“Pulled Over on I-95,” p. 23) Divorce, “despite the years between you / And a hard divorce, the unshrived recriminations…” (“Seen and So Believed,” p. 51) And a wife’s death, “As if his wife had always gone / By the name of death he thinks of her / Whenever he sees or hears the word.” (“In Name Only,” p. 49)

These ordinary tragedies play out against a panorama of tragedy, as evidenced in “Photograph of a Liberated Prisoner, Dachau (1945)” and “The War Criminal Gives His Testimony.” Most often, though, the world’s suffering has little impact on the way we live our lives, “Someone at the next table sighs / Over Guatemala, the tragedy / Of having read an article or watched / A TV special…” (“Who You Are,” p. 53) We go on as we always do.

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