Showing 231 - 240 of 645 annotations tagged with the keyword "Body Self-Image"

Second Opinion

Kendrick, Leatha

Last Updated: Apr-19-2008
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

Poet Leatha Kendrick is the author of two chapbooks, Science in Your Own Back Yard (see annotation) and Heart Cake. In this full-length collection she continues to examine themes explored in her first titles: love and loss; the fleeting of time; and her personal experience of breast cancer. Second Opinion is divided into three sections: the first two sections have 14 poems each, the final section has 13, perhaps to indicate that for this passionate and articulate poet the the final poem is yet to be written. The first poem in the collection, "A lesson in Love Unleashed," sets the theme for the poems that follow: "yes, I think, even in their distorted flesh, / I still desire what's gone. What I'm leaving" (p. 3). In the first and third sections, the poet writes of marital and familial trials and triumphs, both past and present, and in the second section--for me the most vivid in the collection--she writes about breast cancer and how this experience weaves in and out of her other loves and losses. This weaving is given both visual and emotional expression in the poem "Tonight Weaving" (p. 28)

Throughout the book, Kendrick's poems take varying forms and tones, and yet there is always the assurance of a constant voice--personal, passionate and often humorous. In the second section, the poems become more visually complex and fractured, poetic representation of the "distortion" of the flesh as the narrator considers the diagnosis and treatment of her breast cancer. In this section's opening poem, "The Calculus of a Cracked Cup," the poet writes, "Our position is never certain, only our / velocity" (p. 27), adding the concern of the swift passing of time to the collection's overall theme. In "Second Opinion," the title poem, she notes, "I want to believe in sudden remission, / in some way to avert what we are certainly / headed for" (p. 34). But while time rushes on, the reality of cancer, the loss of a breast becomes a "stopped surface" under which a "lost life" wants "its old course, not subject to IVs or a knife" (p. 35).

It is life--difficult and sweet--that is ultimately celebrated in these poems and that overcomes the losses. The most wry poems are found in the breast cancer section: "Christmas, Adolescence, Yin and Yang" (p. 32) is a sort of ode to "Skeeter and Bite," so named by a first love; now "they'll lift / one out, the eye sewn shut by mastectomy." "Costume. Fakery. The Sell." is a tough, nervy poem that has the narrator claiming acceptance for who she is, post surgery: "Alive! Tender, I'm not hiding" (p. 39). Throughout the book there is a subtle triple play on the word "tender": woman as caregiver; woman as collateral in a society that values cleavage; and woman as injured, post op, and physically vulnerable.

In the collection's final poem, "What You Leave Me," the theme of love and loss balanced against time comes to some resolution as the narrator and her partner join in a "sweet tangle": "the blossoming / hide, this bounded / time against brevity" (p. 64).

View full annotation

The Glass Castle

Walls, Jeannette

Last Updated: Apr-14-2008
Annotated by:
Shafer, Audrey

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

The Glass Castle, a gripping memoir about growing up devastatingly poor in America, opens with this first line: "I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster." (p. 3) Jeanette Walls slinks down in the taxi's back seat and returns to her Park Avenue apartment. A few days later, she manages to contact her homeless mother and take her out for dinner, offering her help, yet again. But her mother refuses, and when asked what Jeannette is supposed to say about her parents, her mother replies "Just tell the truth...[t]hat's simple enough." (p.5) And with these words, Walls launches into the history of her upbringing, with all the deprivations, suffering, joys, shame, exasperations, tribulations and sorrows - the story of the Rex and Rose Mary Walls' family.

Rex Walls is an alcoholic and dreamer, his wife an artist and egoist; both are psychotically blind to the basic needs of their four children. Yet the parents do feed the children with love and intellectual stimulation, managing to keep the family unit intact while the children figure out how to survive. The reader first meets the child Jeannette at age three when she is on fire, cooking hot dogs on the stove in a trailer park, completely unsupervised. She requires multiple skin grafts but enjoys the regularity of hospital food, until six weeks later her father abducts her from the hospital in the first of a series of "skedaddles" that the reader learns is the way Rex Walls stays ahead of bill collectors and other authorities.

At each miserable turn, the reader wonders if things can get any worse. They do. The family winds up living in a rotting hut without plumbing in the coal mining town of Welch, West Virginia. Rex steals money from his children, Rose Mary buys herself art books instead of food for the family. The kids eat garbage they secretly remove from trash bins at school.

But finally, one by one, the kids do escape, although, like everyone, they carry the past within them. To varying degrees, each is scarred. Nonetheless, Jeannette works her way through Barnard in New York City and becomes a contributor to MSNBC. Ultimately the book is a tribute to the gutsy resilience of some remarkable individuals.

View full annotation

Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poems (Sequence)

Summary:

This book consists of a series of "found poems" abstracted from transcripts of interviews that Loreen Herwaldt conducted with 24 writers who had previously published accounts of their illnesses. Dr. Herwaldt, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Iowa, began her investigation into the personal experience of illness after having read Mary Swander's Out of this World: A Journey of Healing and Reynolds Price's A Whole New Life, both of which revealed a negative dimension of medical care. These books initiated an "unexpected turn" (p. 1) in Dr. Herwaldt's life, culminating in a sabbatical year during which she interviewed a wide array of writers, intending to investigate the texture and dynamics of their experience of medical care by textual analysis of interview transcripts.

However, as a result of a further (and fortunate) insight, the author decided to abstract and arrange these texts into "found poems" that have "a concentrated emotional power that the unedited stories did not." (p. 5) Among the authors whose stories of illness appear in these poems are Arthur Frank (see The Wounded Storyteller ), Nancy Mairs (A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories), Richard Selzer (Raising the Dead), Oliver Sacks (A Leg to Stand On), Mary Swandler (The Desert Pilgrim: En Route to Mysticism and Miracles), and Christina Middlebrook (Seeing the Crab: A Memoir of Dying). In most cases Dr. Herwaldt has crafted two or more poems giving voice to different aspects of the subject's experience. For example, Richard McCann (pp. 82-90) speaks about loving his primary care physician, why patients can't talk to doctors, what he needs from a doctor, and being labeled as a patient with hepatitis C (cf. "The Resurrectionist").

The author includes a section on "How to Use This Book" (pp.9-20) that summarizes her experience utilizing these poems in medical education settings and provides helpful hints for teaching them.

View full annotation

Cancer Vixen

Marchetto, Marisa

Last Updated: Apr-03-2008
Annotated by:
Holmes, Martha Stoddard

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Graphic Memoir

Summary:

Cancer Vixen is the graphic narrative of Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s eleven-month cancer experience in 2004. Marchetto, a successful forty-something cartoonist for Glamour magazine and the New Yorker, serialized Cancer Vixen in Glamour while undergoing treatment. As well as the narrative of Marchetto’s diagnosis, treatment, and remission, Cancer Vixen recounts the story of Marchetto’s romance and engagement to restaurateur Silvano Marchetto, a narrative embedded in the graphic novel despite preceding it in actual chronology. The narrative explores fears about the cancer's effect on the relationship and about the loss of the chance to be a biological mother, as well as developing the relationship between the engaged couple and between Marisa and her mother (or "(s)mother," as she calls her).

The culture of cancer is another focus, including the social dynamics of having hair during cancer treatment and thus leaving oneself open to critique for not undertaking a strong enough chemotherapy. While this New York story, full of cuisine, couture (including images of the specific shoes Marchetto wore to each chemo), and cappuccino may recall the episodes of the television show Sex in the City featuring cancer, the brightly colored frames of this “Cancer in the City” tale also engage political issues like environmental causes of cancer and the reduced survival rates of women with cancer and no insurance.

View full annotation

On Chesil Beach

McEwan, Ian

Last Updated: Mar-15-2008
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

In summer 1962, virgins Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting take their wedding supper in a hotel suite overlooking stony Chesil Beach on the Dorset coast. Married that afternoon, each is thinking of the bed in the next room. With only a little experience, Edward has waited patiently, but looks forward, enthusiasm mingled with apprehension over his performance. Florence however is revolted and even frightened by the thought of sex, but she does not dare to reveal her fears. They are both embarrassed by the hovering staff, and eventually leave the meal unfinished.

They proceed to the bed. Florence takes the lead which pleases and surprises Edward, but he does not know that she is doing so bravely, to confront the inevitable and get it over with. Their individual thoughts forward and backward through time rehearse their meeting, their love, and the awkward encounters with parents.

It does not go well. Florence races out of the room onto the darkened beach. Edward follows her and they try to talk. She suggests a celibate marriage. He is humiliated and angry. She walks away and he does not call her back. The marriage is annulled and in the last few pages, their lives race by--hers to musical success, his with only one regret.

View full annotation

Summary:

In his Introduction, editor Thom Schramm puts the themes of this anthology into perspective. He notes that the moods associated with bipolar disorder are familiar to everyone. Moreover, the notion that artistic creativity is associated with psychological instability is widespread; in fact, it is almost a stereotype, ranging in time from Plato's depiction of poets as suffering from "divine madness" to contemporary examples, like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell. However, it should be evident that, since we all experience periods of sadness and elation, it is no wonder that poets of all stripes, no matter how "stable" they might be, may evince these moods in their work.

Living in Storms presents an array of contemporary poems grouped to reflect mania and depression from different perspectives. The book has eight sections. In the first three, the poet himself or herself expresses what it is like to be susceptible to mania or depression ("How It Is"), the experience of being there ("In the Mood"), and the experience in retrospect ("Remembering the Episodes"). The next two sections contain poems that approach these moods from more of a distance, either looking at the sufferer from another's perspective, ("Characters") or at the influence of manic-depressive sufferers on those around them ("Family and Friends"). The following section is devoted to poems about artists who suffered from manic-depression ("Artists"). The last two sections contain poems that depict shifts from one mood to the other, either on a daily or general basis ("Daily Shifts") or seasonally ("With the Seasons").

View full annotation

A Kind of Alaska

Pinter, Harold

Last Updated: Mar-13-2008
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Plays

Genre: Play

Summary:

In this one act play, as a result of a new medication, a middle-aged woman named Deborah wakes up after spending nearly 30 years in a "coma." More precisely, she was in a dream-like state of unawareness or altered awareness that Hornby, her doctor, refers to as "a kind of Alaska."(p. 34) Deborah thinks that she has only been "asleep" for a short while, so she asks about her parents and sister, as if she were still the adolescent she remembers. Hornby assures her that her mind has been suspended all that time, although he has been at her side, fighting to keep her alive: "Some wanted to bury you. I forbade it." (p. 34)

 

Uncertain what to say, Pauline, Deborah's younger sister, now enters the hospital room. Hearing Pauline's news of the family, Deborah tries to comprehend what has happened, but it seems just too bizarre. Then Hornby reveals that Pauline has been his wife for more than 20 years. Deborah experiences the walls of her consciousness closing in, "Let me out. Stop it. Let me out. Stop it. Stop it." (p. 38) Suddenly, she returns to the conversation and summarizes everything she has heard. "I think I have the matter in proportion," she concludes.


View full annotation

Consumption

Patterson, Kevin

Last Updated: Mar-04-2008
Annotated by:
Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

In the Arctic, winter goes on for ten months every year. The cold temperatures penetrate every aspect of human life. Existence is a struggle. In the Canadian community of Rankin Inlet, an Inuit woman finds personal tragedy as abundant as the snow. Victoria is diagnosed with tuberculosis (puvaluq) as a child and sent to a sanatorium far south of home. Following treatment with medication and a thoracoplasty, she returns to her town years later. Victoria's experience has changed her view of the world but she quickly discovers that in her absence, the people and locale have transformed too.

She marries an outsider, John Robertson, who is a British businessman. His success and local influence allow him to arrange for a foreign-owned diamond mine to open in the area, and with it, a new hospital for the territory. The couple have three children - a son, Pauloosie, along with two daughters, Justine and Marie.

Victoria seems a magnet for misfortune. At age 16, she has a miscarriage. A fourth child dies during a complicated delivery. Her marriage is increasingly strained beyond repair. Victoria's father suffers a stroke and becomes demented. Her mother dies of lung cancer. Husband John is murdered - someone slits his throat. Marie commits suicide. Pauloosie leaves home and sails to the South Pacific.

The Robertson family frequently interacts with the American primary care physician stationed in the isolated region. Dr. Keith Balthazar is a middle-aged atheist who has toiled in the Arctic for more than 20 years and abuses morphine. He keeps a journal of his experiences and meditations and commiserates with the local priest, Father Bernard.

Escape appears to be the best chance at happiness. For Victoria and most everyone else living in this harsh and beautiful land, survival - both physical and emotional - is hard. Personal choices are confusing. Nature doesn't seem to care one way or another.

View full annotation

Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Visual Arts / Painting/Drawing

Genre: Art with Commentary

Summary:

The basis for this autobiographical essay on the experience of having a malignancy are 92 illustrations, all the work of the author; they include 32 ink or woodcut sketches, 24 charcoal drawings, and many acrylic paintings (16 in full colour). Pope's images evoke the dependence, fear, loneliness, pain, and even the mutilation surrounding cancer illness and therapy.

He describes in plain language the course of his own illness, diagnosis, and treatment; he also relates the experiences of a few fellow patients. Most intriguing is his ready description of the stories behind his pictures: who posed, how he painted them, and what exactly he was trying to convey. When the book was published, Pope was in a hard-won remission from Hodgkin's Disease, but he died the following year of treatment-induced bone marrow failure.

View full annotation

Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Visual Arts / Visual Arts

Genre: Mixed

Summary:

The basis for this autobiographical essay on the experience of having a malignancy are 92 illustrations, all the work of the author; they include 32 ink or woodcut sketches, 24 charcoal drawings, and many acrylic paintings (16 in full colour). Pope's images evoke the dependence, fear, loneliness, pain, and even the mutilation surrounding cancer illness and therapy.

He describes in plain language the course of his own illness, diagnosis, and treatment; he also relates the experiences of a few fellow patients. Most intriguing is his ready description of the stories behind his pictures: who posed, how he painted them, and what exactly he was trying to convey. When the book was published, Pope was in a hard-won remission from Hodgkin's Disease, but he died the following year of treatment-induced bone marrow failure.

View full annotation