Summary:

Like her earlier collection, Words Like Fate and Pain (see this database), the thread of connection among these exquisite poems is the experience of chronic suffering. However the poems vary widely in focus and content, including those that touch on the intimacies of love found and lost, family relationships, musings on the road, political events, philosophical ideas, and qualities of words themselves. All open doors to an inner life deeply examined and thoughtfully lived. The poems deal frankly not only with the experiences of various kinds of pain, but with pain remembered and feared, with the mental detachment that enables one in pain not only to endure, but even at times to be playful about the business of living life in spite of ongoing suffering.

One is aware of the speaker in these poems as not only a patient, but as a writer who loves words, a woman who enters wholeheartedly into the relationships life puts in her path, and an observer with a wry wit and sharp sense of irony. Poem titles include "Cripple Time," "Trauerarbeit," "Phantom Life," "The Mind, That Ocean," "Pain as Metaphor," "Sleeping in My Notebook," "One, With Egg Roll," and "Waltzing the Gorilla."

View full annotation

Summary:

Margaret Hale is raised in fashionable Harley Street along with her cousin Edith, but when Edith marries, Margaret returns to Hampshire County in the South of England to live with her mother and her father, a country clergyman. The pastoral life she has imagined is quickly disrupted by her father's confession that he is no longer able to remain true to the Church of England and will leave his position to become a tutor of adult learners in the northern manufacturing town of Milton. The traumatic relocation is exacerbated by Mrs. Hale's diagnosis with a "deadly disease" (probably cancer) soon after the move.

Margaret takes charge of most of the practical aspects of the move and then assumes charge of her mother's illness, acting as an intermediary between the doctor and her parents. As well as learning more about her own family's servant, Dixon, who has been with her mother since her girlhood, Margaret becomes friendly with textile worker Nicholas Higgins and his daughter Bessy, who is dying of consumption (tuberculosis) from inhaling textile dust. The Milton workers' activism and independence appeal to Margaret; she rethinks both class and labor relations as a result, including charitable relationships. Her strong opinions and actions bring her into conflict with the family of John Thornton, a factory owner and self-made man who is also one of her father's students.

When Margaret shields John from a stone thrown by a striking worker, however, he avows his love for her. A series of obstacles to the relationship include Margaret's initial rebuff of John and her dishonesty about her exiled brother's secret return to his mother's deathbed. Before the ending brings John and Margaret back together--as well as calming the tension between workers and factory owners--Margaret experiences not only the deaths of almost everyone she loves, but also the suicide of one of the striking workers.

View full annotation

Summary:

James Lang was diagnosed with Crohn's disease in 1996, when he was twenty-six years old. Five years later, however, a particularly severe bout with Crohn's, including a hospital stay, dramatically changed his relationship to the disease. Lang's memoir explores his ongoing relationship to Crohn's disease, both in the context of medical reassessments and diagnostic adjustments and in relation to his personal and professional development in his first year as a tenure-track professor of college English.

View full annotation

Summary:

The story opens with the death of the protagonist’s beloved mother, with whom she lives. Ines, a dictionary researcher, is soon jolted from her grief by the excruciating pain of a “twisted and gangrenous gut” (112). After a hospital stay and emergency surgery, she returns home to recuperate from the physical trauma and revisit her mourning. On the day when she can remove the wound dressings, Ines discovers a surprising change in her body: it seems to be turning to stone. Her incision has become a “raised shape, like a starfish, like the whirling arms of a nebula in the heavens” that gradually spreads to the rest of her body, forming "ruddy veins" across her belly and "greenish-white crystals sprouting in her armpits" (119).

Ines assumes that this process is fatal and that she will "observe [death's] approach in a new fantastic form" (121). Deciding to write a record for those who will find her after her demise, she studies the names and nature of minerals in order to understand and describe her metamorphosis. From her new, mineralizing perspective, she realizes that stones can be dynamic and living as well as fixed and dead; minerals are memorials to the relationships and reciprocities between living creatures and dead ones.

Unable to write the record of her transformation, Ines finds herself passionate to be outdoors. She explores the city, looking for "a place to stand in the weather before she became immobile" (127). In an old graveyard, she meets and gradually forms a bond with Thorsteinn, an old Icelandic stonecutter who may also be mourning the death (apparently of a child). The Ines shares the secret of her metamorphosis with the stonecutter and eventually travels with him to his homeland, a geologically young country, where stones are alive and myths tell of “striding stone women.” Thorsteinn sketches here in this landscape and creates a standing stone image of Ines that reflects his ability to see her as she is and find her beautiful: "Petra faction saw that she existed, in there" (150).

Ines's metamorphosis culminates in her inability to see or speak as a human and her ability to perceive a whole new realm of living creatures, "earth bubbles and earth monsters" (151) and other stone people who are "flinging their great arms wide in invitation" (156). She joins their wild dance.

View full annotation

Summary:

Protagonist Mary Lennox, "as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived," is nine years old when she wakes one morning in India to an empty house, forgotten by all in the chaos of a cholera epidemic that has killed her pretty young mother, British army captain father, and most of their servants. The novel charts Mary’s removal to England and her physical, psychological, and moral development on the Yorkshire estate of her widowed uncle Archibald Craven, a reputed "hunchback." As part of her own maturation, Mary catalyzes growth and healing in (and between) her mildly spinally disfigured uncle and his "invalid" son Colin.

The secret garden of the title is Mary’s aunt Lilias’s creation. It has been virtually abandoned since the accident that resulted in Colin’s premature birth and Lilias’s death. Colin himself, while overprotected by the servants, is ignored by his depressed father and hidden in the estate. Mary discovers and rehabilitates both the secret garden and her secret cousin with the help of the working-class Sowerby family, including the servant Martha, her brother Dickon (a boy in tune with nature), and their mother Susan. Archibald, travelling across Europe to escape his sadness, is called back to the garden by a dream of his dead wife and returns to find Colin healthy and walking.

View full annotation

Summary:

When Mary Lennox (Kate Maberly)’s parents die in an earthquake, she is sent from India to live with her uncle, Lord Archibald Craven (John Lynch) at Misslethwaite Manor, his large and lonely estate on the Yorkshire moors. A neglected, lonely, and disagreeable child, Mary changes through encounters with the gregarious maid Martha, an elderly gardener as irritable as she is, and Martha’s brother Dickon (Andrew Knott), a boy at home with nature who helps her rejuvenate a walled, neglected garden she finds on the estate.

Mary also unravels the mysteries associated with Misselthwaite Manor and her aunt and uncle’s family. A depressed widower with a spinal deformity, Lord Craven has locked the garden after his wife’s accidental death. Mary discovers the key to the garden in her aunt’s closed-up boudoir. She also finds her cousin Colin (Heydon Prowse), who has been hidden away because his father thinks he has inherited his bodily and psychiatric illnesses. Mary provokes Colin to leave his bedroom, join her and Dickon in caring for the garden, and finally to summon his father, via a quasi-pagan ritual around a bonfire in the garden, to return from Europe. Lord Craven returns to find his sickly son walking and healthy, and a new family consisting of Colin, Mary, and Lord Craven is formed.

View full annotation

Summary:

John Ames narrates this story in the form of a lengthy letter to his young son. Ames is a 76-year-old minister suffering from angina pectoris and heart failure. He has spent almost all of his life in Gilead, a small town in Iowa. His first wife died during childbirth along with a baby girl. Ames remarried a younger woman who is now 41. They have a son almost 7 years old.

Because Ames believes his death is close at hand, he pens a missive to the boy. Its purpose is to teach his son about all the important things in life Ames may not be around to share with him. During the course of composing the letter, Ames reflects upon his own existence. He recalls the experiences of his father and grandfather who were also ministers.

Reverend Ames likes to think, read, and pray. Born in 1880, he has lived through three wars, the Great Depression, a pandemic of influenza, and droughts. His hope is that his young son will grow into a brave and useful man.

View full annotation

Summary:

A college professor who suffers from Tourette's disorder deals with two challenging students in his English 101 class. Having spent years in therapy, Professor Jorge is now fairly content with his life in spite of the frequent vocal and motor tics that he labors to suppress. Allen Ramsey is the freshman prodigy who induces Jorge to reassess the implications of his existence. Anna is an undergraduate who is preoccupied with death. She has a crush on Jorge and leaves a suicide note in his office box.

One day Allen is late for class because he has a seizure. His seizures increase in frequency, but Allen doesn't mind them. He relishes them. Allen acknowledges that "It's as though I can smell my thoughts" during a seizure and "the world just changes" (170). Jorge finds Allen on the campus ground in a postictal state. He summons an ambulance, and Allen is admitted to the hospital.

When Allen returns to class weeks later, he is no longer the same person. With the use of medication and possibly surgery, doctors have abolished his seizures along with his former personality. Allen receives an "Incomplete" grade for the class. The semester's experience has Jorge lamenting Allen's shocking transformation, attempting to convince Anna of life's worth, and mulling the magnitude of his words.

View full annotation

Summary:

Cortney Davis follows her 30 year career in nursing, from her experience as a student nurse washing a patient's feet, to dealing as a nurse practitioner with life and death issues in an inner city OB/GYN clinic. Her essays present epiphanies where she realizes what is important in a confusing and ambiguous situation, why she writes poetry even though she is exhausted from her daily work in the clinic, why she is a nurse when the job  sometimes seems overpowering and depressing.  The positive connections with patients--through kindness, caring, truth-telling, touch-outweigh the difficulties.  Tedious routines are often transformed by spiritual insights and empathy. And sometimes what seems like a miracle inserts itself in a time of grief. Whether she is talking to a man in a coma or treating a sexually-abused teenager, her focus is on the care of the patient.

View full annotation

Summary:

Vicki Forman's twins, Evan and Ellie, were born in 2000 at twenty-three weeks' gestation.  Fetuses could legally be aborted up to twenty-four weeks, but rules regulating treatment of extremely premature babies differed from one hospital to another.  Daughter of a doctor, Forman knew how slim were the chances of survival and how great the chances of serious disability if either of the twins did survive.  Grieving, but realistic, she and her husband asked for a DNR order, but learned that such orders did not strictly apply to the situation of children like their twins.  Instead, the line between  the parents' authority and the doctors' remained blurry and decision-making vexed not only by technical and emotional complications, but by conflicting legal guidelines as they made their way through many months of hospitalization and home treatment of their surviving son.

Ellie, the daughter, died at four days.  Evan lived for eight years with disabilities that completely reorganized family life, and required constant monitoring, management of equipment, and careful orchestration of parental relationship to their older child, Josie, and their special-needs child.  Much of the narrative covers the period of hospitalization during Evan's early months and the negotiations between parents, physicians, and other caregivers.  It also touches on Forman's own emotional responses to the strenuous learning curve required of a parent who suddenly finds herself with a special-needs child.

View full annotation