Summary:

The apparent "subject" of Reynolds Price's novel, The Promise of Rest, is HIV/AIDS, yet it is also a novel of family, marriage, father-son relationships, and friendship between men--in addition to one of caring, suffering, and the unspeakable pain of parents watching their child die. The novel opens with Wade Mayfield, a thirty-two year-old gay, white architect infected with AIDS reluctantly returning from New York City to his family home in North Carolina to live out his final months. Almost blind, unable to manage even with daily visits from caregivers, he allows his father Hutch to come to New York to close the apartment that he shared with his African-American lover, Wyatt, who infected Wade and committed suicide ten weeks prior to Wade's leaving.

Once home, the story becomes a long conversation between Wade and Hutch. Interspersed in that most loving, painful, sometimes joyful, intense conversation on the way to Wade's death is emotional haggling between Hutch and Ann, Wade's mother and Hutch's ex-wife, who feels denied a role in the care of her only child; the continuing conversation between Hutch and Straw, his best and oldest friend with whom he had a physically intimate relationship years before and with whom he is still strongly connected; the dailiness of students (Hutch is a literature professor); finding help with the caregiving; and trying to understand the story of Wade's life before he returned home that has potentially great bearing on the Mayfield family even after Wade's death. The novel closes with Wade's death and the days thereafter, a death that fulfilled Wade's "undaunted determination to die as himself."

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Summary:

Second Son chronicles the changes in family relationships that follow disclosure of a son's AIDS. The father's initial response reveals unexamined attitudes that complicate the supportive response he'd like to give. Father and son are brought into unfamiliar and unwelcome intimacy, the former wanting to "fight it," the latter wanting to turn inward, accept his condition and decide how to live out his life.

Father and son find that they handle sickness in much the same way they have handled the other aspects of their divergent lives. A new lover, who also has AIDS, finally provides what the family, tragically, cannot. The story highlights confusions about what family members owe one another and makes clear how the families of the sick need to be healed if they are to become healing communities.

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Summary:

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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Summary:

Alice Jones divides The Knot into three sections. The first is a series of poems evoking the poet's painful and tender relationship with Peter, a former lover who is dying of AIDS. We encounter him first on a rainy day in his hospital bed at St. Vincent's ("The Umbrella"), and then through flash-backs to their earlier lives ("In the Pine Woods," "Painting," "Communal Living"). In the long poem "Blood Clot" the author creates and sustains a dynamism between detachment and engagement, objectivity and subjectivity, medical and personal knowledge: from "This time it's his heart. He has / a tumor" to "The glacier that / freezes us in place for centuries, / the same old separateness, only / this time it's called death. / How dare you do it to me / one more time."

The second, and most intensely personal, section imagines the poet's relationship with her mother. The title poem is the centerpiece here. In it, the knot has two faces: the tie that binds us together and an obstacle to be overcome. While loss is real, she writes, "I refuse to be alone. // There is only one / of us. Loss does not / exist in our vocabulary." ("The Lie") The last section consists of poems on a variety of topics, including a long poem about gross anatomy as an initiatory experience ("The Cadaver").

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Summary:

Brother Carl and sister Anna take a whirlwind trip to Europe after they learn that Anna has a fatal illness (ATD or Acquired Toilet Disease) contracted from being a teacher of elementary school children. That wacky disease and several other clues alert the audience to the fact that Anna is not the one who is really sick--that Carl is dying of AIDS and Anna is imaginatively creating this whole trip which they could never take since Carl was dying in a Baltimore hospital.

The entire action of the play takes place "really" in the Baltimore hospital, though the audience follows Anna in her fantasy trip to Paris, Munich and Vienna. When Anna shows slides of their European trip, all the shots are scenes from Johns Hopkins University Medical School. The preface to the play includes a very touching letter from Paula Vogel's brother, who died of AIDS in 1987.

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Summary:

Two married couples spend the Fourth of July weekend at a summer house on Fire Island. The brother of Sally Truman has recently died of AIDS and has willed his Fire Island house to her. Her husband, Sam, opens the play testing the chlorine level of the water in the pool.

It becomes clear that everyone is afraid of somehow getting AIDS from swimming in the same pool that Sally's brother used to swim in. As she believes, "One drop of water in your mouth or an open sore and we'll be infected with my brother and his black lover and God knows who else was in here."

Sam's sister, Chloe, and her husband, John, share the apprehension, though John has cancer of the esophagus and is not particularly worried about AIDS. In fact he intentionally sticks his head in the pool and gets a mouthful of water which he spits at the others. The play reveals both marriages in trouble and many examples of superficial values and prejudices.

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Summary:

This first collection of poems includes a series of strong and well-crafted personal narratives. Several deal with the poet's experience in nurse's training. For example, in "Down There" she recalls childhood baths when she would squat and pour a jug of warm water between her legs ("down there") as she washes post-operative women and thinks of the intensely poetic hospital questions, "Can you make wind? / Can you make water?"

In "We Were Gulls" she visualizes the nursing students on Ward Nine and evokes their encounter with a repulsive old man who said, "there isn't a one of you / I wouldn't give a squeeze to / if I could hold you / in my arms / right here in this bed." In "In the Hospital Garden" she recalls the titillating episode of a doctor's wife who gave birth to a "radiation mutation."

But the poet's nursing is not confined to the professional sphere--in "Madame Abundance" she speaks of her son's "string of drool" against her own "milk-dampened blouse of the breast." Poems like "Night Terror," "The Street Where We Lived," and "At the Horse Pavilion" bring the reader into the love and pain of family life. "How long will it last?" the poet asks in one of her poems. In another she answers, "I live alone / I live alone / I live alone / I live alone."

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This collection of twenty-seven images was culled from an exhibition featuring seventy-five individuals with AIDS photographed over a ten-month period in the late 1980s. Solomon’s project recalls the work of photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans who chronicled the devastation of rural America during the Great Depression. However, Solomon eschews the spontaneity of documentary photography for the formality of portraiture so that the figure itself is always at the center of the picture plane. Ranging in format from single full-figures to group images, from dramatic close-up facial shots to nearly abstract still-lifes, these images capture the humanity of the diverse persons affected by AIDS.

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Summary:

This is a story about storytelling. The narrator--a writer--and her aged, ill father are discussing the narrator's style of story writing. The father wants her to write a story that is simple, "Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next." The writer doesn't like telling stories that way because "it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life."

Because she wants to please her father, the writer narrates a one-paragraph tale about a woman and her teenage son, a drug addict. But this is not what the father had in mind at all. "You misunderstood me on purpose . . . You left everything out." The father asks the writer questions, attempting to fill in details of the story that he believes are important. The writer agrees to tell the story again.

The second version is longer, complicated, unlikely, and, like the first version, has an unhappy conclusion, ending, "The End." The father is discouraged and saddened by this version. How could his daughter, the writer, leave the mother in the story in such an abandoned state? As they discuss the ending the father becomes exasperated with his daughter's bantering: "Tragedy! . . . When will you look it in the face?"

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Summary:

Stella is the wife of Max Raphael, the deputy superintendent of a maximum security psychiatric hospital near London (based perhaps on Broadmoor, where the author's father was medical superintendent), and mother of a ten-year-old son. She becomes involved in an obsessive sexual affair with one of the institution's patients, Edgar Stark, a schizophrenic sculptor institutionalized after murdering and decapitating his wife.

Stark uses his affair with Stella to escape, and she runs away to London to join him. After a few passionate but squalid weeks in hiding, Edgar's illness resurfaces, evinced both in the violence he shows to a sculpture he's making of Stella's head, and in his paranoid jealousy. She runs away from him and is captured by the police and returned her to her husband, who has been fired because of his wife's role in the escape of so dangerous an inmate.

The family moves to a remote hospital in North Wales, where Max has a minor position, and Stella becomes severely depressed, to the extent that she stands by helplessly as her son dies in an accidental drowning. As a result, she is institutionalized--she returns to the hospital, not as the superintendent's wife, but as a patient. Edgar has meanwhile been recaptured (in North Wales, seeking out Stella either to take her with him or to kill her), but they never meet again, for Stella commits suicide.

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