Summary:

This poem is a series of short meditations on death. The poet begins by surveying his surroundings, "Here / the air is sharp-edged / like the air will be / at the end of your days." But, no, the poem is not about the abstract subject of death--the poet encounters his own death. "At least I won't have to / know myself then, / won't have to see my own corpse."

Encountering death is itself a journey, "Each lap of the journey / dangerous, / the destination / kept secret." Yet he realizes that the meditation, the journey, has "nothing in common with / what the end of my days / will be." Death is irreducibly unimaginable and alien.

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This novel chronicles the long journey home of a Civil War soldier, Inman, to Cold Mountain in North Carolina. The story begins in a military hospital, and Inman's neck wound, a long difficult-to-heal horizontal slice received in battle, is drawing flies. Inman is a moral man, and the brutality and killing he has witnessed on the battlefield lead him to leave the hospital AWOL and journey secretively, by foot, back to Ada, his love.

The trip is perilous; Inman is subject not only to the difficulties of near starvation and a poorly healing wound, but also the cruelties of people he meets along the way. However, every so often, he is also succored by compassionate people, such as the goat woman who provides the cure for his neck wound, if not for the wounds inside. Intertwined with Inman's story is Ada's: her preacher father dies of tuberculosis, leaving her utterly unable to provide for her own basic needs on the farm. Fortunately, a self-reliant young woman, Ruby, joins Ada on the farm, and helps transform both the farm and Ada.

The book details the ways of nourishment: physical (precise descriptions of food, its paucity and preparation) and nonphysical (themes of love, generosity, intellectual curiosity, and spiritual questing underpin the book). Cold Mountain itself provides both types of nourishment by offering hope, goals, shelter, food and a place where love and forgiveness are possible despite the savagery of man.

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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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This is a collection of 111 poems, all about women who are old. As the editor says in her introduction, it is not a book about becoming old, but about being old, and the book bears the pointed reminder that an old woman is still a woman, as well as being old (vii). The poems are arranged in ten sections, from portraits of old women (usually grandmothers, here) as seen by the young, through explorations of their work and wisdom, their relationships and sexuality, the vivid and sometimes shocking realities of their bodies, their illnesses and weaknesses, institutionalization and nursing homes, and finally, their confrontations with death and the sense of loss in those they leave behind.

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This play dramatizes the story of Anthony, a character with AIDS, who implores a retired surgeon to end his suffering. Torn between his ethical beliefs and empathic response, Dr. Robert Chapman finally agrees to advise Anthony and his partner, Thomas, as to the method and means for committing suicide. Dr. Chapman's moral conflict is mirrored by Thomas's emotional one as he is caught between respecting a lover's wishes and fearing his premature death. The couple's friend, Susanah, reinforces Thomas's and Dr. Chapman's concern about criminal consequences. After a failed suicide attempt on his own, Anthony has a change of heart.

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This is a memoir, one that tells of a family’s move from California to the more rarefied life of the Alaskan wilderness. Living in a trailer and, later, a house they build, the family struggles with harsh winters and little money, maintaining their belief in the superiority of this way of life over what the parents had begun to experience as enervating in the mainland U.S.

At the age of seven, Natalie is savagely attacked by a neighbor’s sled dog. The attack leaves her with half of her face and numerous other serious wounds. In and out of consciousness as her mother and the neighbors await an ambulance, she remembers "the dogs, and their chains, and my own blood on the snow," (50) as well as the sensation of being moved on the stretcher and hearing one of the neighbor’s children say "Natalie’s dying."

Doctors told her parents she would not be likely to survive more than two days, and this memoir tells of her survival against the odds, spending years in and out of hospitals with numerous surgeries. Kusz weaves tales of her family’s history (her father was a Polish Russian) and the intense love that sustained them throughout her healing and arduous recovery and, later, her teenage pregnancy (and decision to keep the baby) and, finally, her mother’s early death and the progress of the family’s grief and recovery.

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Blake's vigorous imagination is seen in this painting where he shows Adam and Eve discovering Abel's body as Cain prepares to bury it. Adam and Eve are kneeling in horror next to Abel's white and rigid body. Adam looks with shock at Cain, who runs away, tearing at his hair. Eve throws herself over Abel's body in a gesture of extreme grief. Her arms form a circle as she bends over Abel with her head thrown down and her hair falling in waves over his body. Although posed and awkward, Adam and Eve's gestures effectively express their emotions. The newly-dug, dark long horizontal grave, emphasized by the shovel laying parallel to it in the foreground, creates a deep gash that separates the fleeing son from his parents.

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This is a collection of stories and sketches by a practicing neurologist. Most of the material is clinical and autobiographical. In "Mrs. Bachman" a new patient enters the doctor's office, carrying a thick stack of medical records. It all started in 1946 and no doctor has ever found the explanation of her condition. Meanwhile, the doctor is wearing contact lenses for the first time. His eyes begin to tear. Mrs. Bachman thinks that he is crying over her misfortune. She consoles him, "I want you to know that you are the kindest, most sympathetic man I have ever met."

In "Intensive Care" an elderly woman is agitated after a seizure. The staff try unsuccessfully to calm her. Finally, her husband approaches and kisses her. She settles peacefully and they hold hands.

The doctor in "Continuing Medical Education" finally discovers metastatic breast cancer as the cause of a psychotherapist's neck pain, long after he and other physicians had told her again and again that the "driving mechanism" of her chronic pain was "unresolved anger and frustration." In a longer essay, "The Narrow Bridge," the author reflects on the meaning of healing, "Healing helps us find a place in this world for ourselves and for each other."

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The story takes place in the men's cancer ward of a hospital in a city in Soviet Central Asia. The patients in Ward 13 all suffer from cancer, but differ in age, personality, nationality, and social class (as if such a thing could be possible in the Soviet "classless" society!). We are first introduced to Pavel Rusanov, a Communist Party functionary, who enters the hospital because of a rapidly-growing neck tumor.

We soon learn, however, that the book's central character is Oleg Kostoglotov, a young man who has recently been discharged from a penal camp and is now "eternally" exiled to this particular province. Only two weeks earlier, he was admitted to the ward in grave condition from an unspecified tumor, but he has responded rapidly to radiation therapy. Among the doctors are Zoya, a medical student; Vera Gangart, a young radiologist; and Lyudmila Dontsova, the chief of radiation therapy.

Rusanov and Kostoglotov respond to therapy and are eventually discharged; other patients remain in the ward, get worse, or are sent home to die. In the end Kostoglotov boards a train to the site of his "eternal" exile: "The long awaited happy life had come, it had come! But Oleg somehow did not recognize it."

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In 1938 a 13-year old boy lives through a late summer day in a small town in Tidewater, Virginia. As he delivers the day’s newspapers for Quigley, the local drugstore owner, his mother lies at home dying of cancer. She screams in unrelenting pain, but Dr. Beecroft won’t allow her to have a higher dose of morphine--"Jeff, I just don’t think I can give her any more." He does offer to try a bit of cocaine, but she soon sinks into a terminal coma.

Through the boy’s eyes and memory, we learn of the tension between husband and wife (both well educated people) and about their life in his home town among ignorant Rednecks. As German troops are massing along the border of Czechoslovakia, the boy’s mother dies. His father greets the sympathy of the local clergyman and his wife with a violent tirade against God (if he exists).

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