Summary:

The narrator, painlessly removing a splinter from his wife's hand, recalls the scene when he was a boy of seven and his father removed an "iron sliver" splinter from his palm. The father had skillfully distracted his son by telling a story in a voice reassuring and low: "a well / of dark water, a prayer."

Darker themes are alluded to--his father's hands were used not just to give love and protection, but also discipline. The narrator notes that as a boy he did not over-dramatize the scene. Rather, something precious was exchanged between father and son. In fact, it could have appeared to the onlooker that the father was "planting" (rather than removing) "a silver tear, a tiny flame" on his son's palm. The poem ends with the boy holding the removed splinter and kissing his father.

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The speaker, a young male, relates how he and his 26 year-old sister live together. They both work; she rises before dawn, he, later, returning home after one a.m. They sleep in the same bed. The sister is an assembly-line worker, skilled at her job, but "let me be frank about this: . . not smart." He helps her with the chores of daily life--answering the mail, cooking (cookbooks are too confusing for her). She has been unlucky with men, some of whom have physically abused her: " I've rubbed / hand cream into the bruises on her shoulders . . . I've even cried / along with her."

There is a fond intimacy between them. But is it sexual? "By now I believe I know / exactly what you're thinking" says the brother, three-quarters of the way through the poem. How could they resist sexual intimacy? His sister is beautiful, he admits to being curious about her body, she is vulnerable and needy. Well, if that is what you think, says the speaker "you're / the one who's wrong. You haven't heard a word." [41 lines]

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This novel is a coming of age narrative, written from the perspective of Bone, the out-of-wedlock (hence, bastard) young daughter of one of the fiercely proud, dirt-poor Boatwrights of Greenville County, South Carolina. The story moves from Bone's very young recollections of life with her waitress mother Anne and her numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins; through her mother's brief marriage and quick widowhood; to her volatile, painful marriage to Daddy Glenn, whose jealousy of Bone, combined with his own destructive evilness, leads the story to a heinous climax of sexual abuse.

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This is the wonderfully strange story of Mikage Sakurai, a young woman who has just lost her grandmother, her last living relative, and serendipitously finds a new "family" when Yuichi Tanabe and his mother Eriko invite her to live with them. The story weaves around Mikage's growing sense of safety and attachment to this unusual family; Yuichi's own coming of age issues as a young man; and Eriko's unconventional life as a nightclub owner . . . and the fact that she was formerly Yuichi's father.

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The narrator, Meera, is an Asian Indian American with a "good life": a beautiful apartment in San Francisco, a challenging job at a bank, and an attractive, attentive, and successful boyfriend Richard. Despite her mother's constant urgings for marriage ("prelude to that all-important, all-consuming event--becoming a mother" [76]), Meera feels no compulsion to do so. Then one day her life is irreversibly changed when she finds, huddled under a stairwell in her apartment building, a young boy, who she take in and cares for as her own.

Fearful and wordless, the boy adapts to life with Meera, and she to him. Her friends, especially Richard, do not have a clue as to her intense attachment to Krishna, the name she has given him. Worried that she might lose him to child protective services, Meera goes through the process of becoming a foster parent without informing the authorities that she has Krishna living with her. When they find out, he is taken from her, placed in foster care elsewhere, and eventually runs away.

During the following year, Meera looks for him everywhere and grieves as a mother who had lost a child. She briefly considers moving back to India and taking her mother up on some of the men her mother had found for her, "if she could find me a widower with a little boy of about seven. Such a man, I reasoned, would understand about mother-love far more than Richard--or any other American male, for that matter--ever could." (106) But she does not, and eventually marries Richard, on the condition that they not have children.

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Subtitled Women Novelists of Color and the Politics of Medicine, this book draws on novels by eleven women to illustrate how physical and emotional states of health and illness are linked directly to social justice. The book is divided into two parts. The first five chapters deal with individual characters, their illnesses, and sometimes their healing: Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place: A Novel in Seven Stories, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Toni Morrison's Beloved and The Bluest Eye, Louise Erdrich's Tracks, and Sapphire's Push are among the works Stanford uses to examine women who have become ill because of broken ties to their histories and communities, because of racial hatred, or because of domestic and sexual violence (see this database for annotations).

The second part of the book finds novels examining medicine itself. Stanford uses Ana Castillo's So Far from God, Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (annotated in this database), Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (annotated in this database), and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents again to raise connections between patients and social conditions but also to ask questions about bioethics and uncertainty, medicine and epistemology, and how medicine might resist dehumanizing trends through the "myriad possibilities of communitas" (218).

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As editor Judy Schaefer writes in her introduction, this collection provides "the rare opportunity to read both the poem and the poet's commentary." It is somewhat like a good poetry reading, where we get to hear about the events, thoughts, feelings and contexts that have stimulated the poem. Often the writer's commentaries have a richness of their own, complementing the poetry but not necessary to it. Also the commentaries describe some of the writing process the nurse poets go through in creating the poem. The fourteen nurse poets in this volume have all published their work in journals and anthologies, but this is the first collection to include commentaries along with the poems.

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This short novel is the story of one man’s death, starting with his interment at the cemetery, where his daughter and older brother offer reminiscences over the coffin; and then dwelling on aspects of his life within which the seeds of death germinated and grew. The man himself is unnamed—Everyman—and his death is no different than any other. At the same time, this death is different because the dead person’s narrative voice remains behind to tell the story.

As a young boy in his father’s jewelry store, he fiddles around in a drawer of old broken watches that his father has accepted as trade-ins. The boy is a dreamer, an artist. But he goes into the advertising business to earn a living, rather than pursuing his first love, painting. He marries and divorces three times, becomes alienated from his sons by the first marriage, and winds up spending his relatively affluent, but bleak, retirement years in a New Jersey condo, maintaining at least some contact with his daughter Nancy. Meanwhile, his brother Howie becomes a fantastically successful international businessman still married to his wife of 45 years and close to his loving family.

Everyman’s brushes with death begin when he is still a child admitted to the hospital for a hernia repair and his roommate dies during the night. As a relatively young man, he experiences a close call when he collapses and is found to have a burst appendix and peritonitis. Later, he attends his father’s Orthodox Jewish funeral, where the mourners actively bury the coffin. In 1989 he experiences a massive heart attack, followed by coronary bypass surgery. In 1998 he is admitted for renal artery angioplasty. The next year he requires left carotid artery surgery. The next, placement of coronary artery stents. The next, insertion of a permanent defibrillator. Finally, he learns that the right carotid artery has now become obstructed. During the subsequent surgery, he dies: “He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he’d feared from the start.” (p. 182)

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Dr. Aloysius Lana, a "Black Doctor" of Spanish ancestry, settled in a Lancashire town and courted Miss Frances Morton, a young woman of the local gentry. After he unexpectedly broke off their engagement, he was found dead, and Frances's brother was arrested. At the trial, Dr. Lana himself appeared: the corpse was instead his dissipated twin brother Ernest, dead of a heart attack. Ernest's secret arrival had forced Aloysius to dissolve his engagement, not wishing scandal; Ernest's death allowed Aloysius to create a new identity abroad, his future shattered. But, hearing that the death had been misdiagnosed as murder, Aloysius explained the situation, and he and the Mortons were reunited.

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Untouchable. Paul Bannerman considers himself a modern day leper. Diagnosed with papillary carcinoma of the thyroid at the age of 35, the white ecologist in South Africa undergoes surgery to remove the malignant thyroid gland. Four week later, he is treated with radioactive iodine to obliterate any residual cancerous cells. Paul will remain radioactive for 16 days and poses a risk to anyone in contact with him. He must be quarantined. His parents, Adrian and Lyndsay, offer to care for him in their home so that Paul will not expose his wife, Berenice (Benni), and 3-year-old son, Nickie to potentially harmful radioactivity. While at his parent’s house, Paul is isolated. Nothing of Paul’s is allowed to mingle with that of others. He spends considerable time in the garden reflecting on his life.

As Paul recovers, his parent’s marriage unravels. His mother has had a previous affair. Now his father has a fling of his own (with the tour guide) during a trip to Mexico. His dad never returns home and dies of heart failure in Norway. Paul’s mother adopts an HIV-positive 3-year-old black girl.

Benni wants to have another child, but Paul is worried. Are his radioactive sperm still capable of fertilization, and if so, will the child be somehow deformed or mutilated? Eventually conception occurs, and the baby is healthy. Paul’s most recent scan shows no signs of recurrent cancer. On the professional front, Paul gets additional good news. The environmental and conservation organization he works for has been successful in opposing and temporarily halting a mining project in the sand dunes and the development of a pebble-bed nuclear reactor. Lately, most things associated with Paul are starting to glow.        

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