Showing 11 - 20 of 751 Poetry annotations

Imagining Vesalius: An Ekphrastic, Scholarly and Literary Celebration of the 1543 De Humani Corporis Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius

Ratzan, Richard

Last Updated: Jul-19-2021
Annotated by:
Galbo, MA, MILS, Sebastian

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Anthology (Mixed Genres)

Summary:

Richard M. Ratzan brings together scholars and creative writers to celebrate the legacy of the sixteenth-century Flemish physician and anatomist, Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), and his 1543 landmark text, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body). Ratzan defines the volume as an “ekphrastic collection of poetry, art and short prose” inspired by “the inimitably conceived and executed anatomical woodcuts” of Vesalius’s most enduring creation (xi). Organized by different genres, Ratzan presents introductory essays, ekphrastic works, translations of Vesalius-inspired poems, and detailed note and bibliography sections. The collection does not merely panegyrize but articulates the deeper intellectual import of De Humani’s meticulous anatomical renderings. Sachiko Kusukawa’s introductory essay frames De Humani as a “rhetorically charged polemic and defense” that challenged the European medical institution in two key ways (3). First, it promoted the revival of the “ancient [Greek and Roman] practice of healing based on diet, medicines and surgery,” a bold effort that aimed to resuscitate anatomy and other forms of “hands-on engagement” that had fallen out of favor with Vesalius’s contemporaries (2). Second, De Humani emendated the anatomical descriptions advanced by Galen, a second-century physician who promoted dissection in his Anatomical Procedures and whom European physicians considered an authority (3). This volume captures the fascinating fusion of artistry and intellectual individuality that characterizes Vesalius’s work.

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Three Poems by Felice Aull

Aull, Felice

Last Updated: Jul-12-2021
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Poet Felice Aull has three poems in "Lullabies & Confessions," an anthology of poems about parenting published by University Professors Press. In her poems, Aull often bravely sheds her professional mantle to reveal personal experiences, deeply observed.

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Hair

Corso, Gregory

Last Updated: Apr-25-2021
Annotated by:
Mahl, Evan

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The poem, through an account of the narrator’s experiences with losing hair, explores issues such as aging, sexuality, and our impotence when faced with the vagaries of nature as it transforms our bodies. Ranging from ancient Egyptian lore to dime store pharmacies, Corso weaves a kaleidoscope of images about how humans treat and worry about their hair and how hair has been a mythopoetic vehicle for millennia.Much of the poem employs angry though humorous language whereby the narrator speaks to his hair and pleads with the gods to reverse his fate. Corso writes, "To lie in bed and be hairless is a blunder only God could allow--"; and later, "Damned be hair! . . . Hair that costs a dollar fifty to be murdered!" The poem ends with an angry diatribe against hair and an inspired denigration of its mythological power.

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Funeral Mass

PK, Page

Last Updated: Nov-16-2020
Annotated by:
Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

"Funeral Mass" is a 23- line poem consisting of 11 couplets and one single line (line 8) - all in free verse, unrhymed. It describes a church funeral service for an infant with both parents and family/friends in supportive attendance. Its primary focus is the contrast between the parents' reactions to this death and the behavior of the officiating priests representatives of a Christian denomination, most likely the Roman Catholic Church, since the priests are wearing stoles "embroidered by nuns".

P. K. Page was a Canadian poet and painter who had an intense interest in the mundane aspects of life which, through her microscopic observation and terse but rich style, converted into lapidary poetic gems.






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The Talking Cure: New and Selected Poems

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Sep-10-2020
Annotated by:
Kohn, Martin

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

The Talking Cure is Jack Coulehan’s 11th book, seven of which, including this collection, are books of his poetry. This collection begins with selected works from his six previous books of poetry and continues with a selection of poems in the imagined voice of Chekhov. These sections are followed by previously uncollected poems, and the book ends with 25 new poems reflecting the title of this book--“The Talking Cure”. The poems represent multiple viewpoints—patients, caregivers, family members as they struggle to make sense of the vicissitudes—and unexpected joys—in life. The poems have appeared over the past four decades in medical journals (primarily Annals of Internal Medicine and Journal of the American Medical Association) and in many literary journals including Prairie Schooner and Negative Capability Press. 

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I Hear Their Voices Singing: Poems New and Collected

Davis, Cortney

Last Updated: Jul-24-2020
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

 Cortney Davis has divided this collection of her poetry into seven major sections which she calls “Voices.” The first and last sections are “Voices of Healing” which frame and wrap around the others: “Home,” “Desire,” “Suffering,” “Faith,” and “Letting Go and Holding On.” The sections include previously published poems as well as new ones.  Davis is known for her ability to see and understand what is going on and to express that in ways that help the reader “get it.”  This collection also shows her ability to hear the unique voices that express suffering, faith, desire—and to convey empathic understanding of the speaker.  Sometimes she gets angry with the speaker. The poems range through time, from her childhood, nursing training, nursing experiences, deaths of her parents, to more current experiences with grandchildren.  Throughout there is a consistent caring and compassion, mixed with many other feelings, many of them contradictory.

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Mercy

Montgomery, Judith

Last Updated: Mar-27-2020
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

"Mercy," winner of the Wolf Ridge Press Narrative / Poetic Medicine Prize, contains nineteen powerful poems--poems that provide an intimate look into the author's role as caregiver to her husband who is living with, and being treated for, liposarcoma.  But the poems in this small volume are not just about husband and wife.  Cancer becomes a third character, one who is often addressed as a presence lingering in the same house, sleeping in the same bed, never absent from every moment of struggle or from any moments of joy.  In the opening poem, "Cozy" (page 1), the couple has "escaped" to a remote rented cabin.  They slip "from love-rumpled featherbed and sheets" feeling "safe" within the sturdy cabin walls that "keep out driving rain or freeze."  For those hours, nothing can spoil their happiness, "even Cancer, who squats on our stoop, / flipping his gold coin in lazy arcs."  At the close of "Cozy," as the couple drives home from their respite, Cancer rides with them, sitting between them "as he hums and nods / pleasantly--first to you, then to me, // one hand lightly resting on each near thigh."  The author weaves this threatening image of Cancer as an ever-present entity throughout the poems that follow.

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From Nothing

Krugovoy Silver, Anya

Last Updated: Jan-06-2020
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

There are 48 poems in this volume (the author's third full-length collection), divided into three sections.  The author's first book, “The Ninety-Third Name of God” introduced us to her family and especially to her diagnosis--inflammatory breast cancer--the disease discovered in 2004 during her pregnancy, the disease that claimed her life in August, 2018 when she was forty-nine-years old.

In her second collection, “I Watched You Disappear”  Silver's poems invited us to accompany her on her journey through treatment, anger, despair, determination, and faith. This third collection (her penultimate) continues the author's beautifully written illness narrative, again presenting moments of joy and of despair, and always of hope.

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I Watched You Disappear

Krugovoy Silver, Anya

Last Updated: Nov-21-2019
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

There are 46 poems in this volume (the author's second full-length collection), divided into four sections.  The author's first book, "The Ninety-Third Name of God" , introduced us to her family and especially to her diagnosis--inflammatory breast cancer--the disease discovered in 2004 during her pregnancy, the disease that claimed that claimed her life in August, 2018, when she was forty-nine-years old.  This second collection continues Silver's illness narrative, poems that might serve as a journal of her journey through treatment, anger, despair, determination, and faith.

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The Ninety-Third Name of God

Krugovoy Silver, Anya

Last Updated: Jul-25-2019
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

There are 46 poems in this volume (the author's first full-length collection), divided into three parts--the poems in the second section are in memory of women who have died of inflammatory breast cancer, the same disease that claimed the life of the author in August, 2018, when she was forty-nine-years old.  Diagnosed in 2004 during her pregnancy, Anya waited until after her son Noah was born to begin cancer treatment.  These poems, published in 2010, begin in images of her domestic life and her family, move forward to her cancer diagnosis (p. 17: "Biopsy"), and progress to examine, in poems that balance beauty and pain, what it is like to live with the knowledge of early death.  This awareness imparts a crystalline honesty and urgency to every poem. 

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