Like Epsilon Country and Dirty Details: The Days and Nights of a Well Spouse (Cohen's 1999 narrative plea for reforms that address the conditions of families providing chronic care), the poems in Chronic Progressive can be difficult to read.  Cohen refuses to spare us any of the dirty physical details or her ambivalence or her anger about the level and duration of care she provides for Jeff.  But her refusal challenges readers to ask how much labor of care is too much.  Certainly, we recognize that caregiving responsibilities arise from special relationships, such as marriage.  Certainly, many people find deep satisfaction, despite their frustrations, performing familial caregiving.  But are responsibilities for such caregiving unconditional?  Who decides?  Cohen's poems give us the opportunity to view accurate descriptions of what the labor of care entails, physically and psychically, before answering those questions or speaking of the ethics of care.

Cohen makes the psychic effects of care available in form as well as content.  The poems have the immediacy of journal entries.  Several are precisely dated, as "Phone Call From the Hospital A La Molly Bloom," which inscribes the date of Jeff's death before an explosion of relief that's bound to unsettle many readers: "Yes / Yessie yessie yes. . . Yes! Under my breath. / Yes! Behind my back" (169-170).  The poems are brief, most with short lines, short stanzas, strings of monosyllabic words, and some unpredictable line breaks, all suggesting someone taking quick breaths.  Staccato rhythms, like a heartbeat, carry the words from the first to last lines.  There's also insistent, simple rhyming, as in children's verses, seeming like Cohen's attempts to create order in her universe from sound.

Most poems, located in an "incessant present," express the "emotional battering" and frustration that recall Arthur Frank's descriptions of the voice of chaos in The Wounded Storyteller (99,101), annotated in this database.  Yet, despite making the caregiver's vulnerability so readily available, Cohen's poems reveal her resisting that vulnerability with the arduous work of sustaining a self through her labors: parenting, writing, teaching, sustaining friendships, risking new intimacies, and railing against the universe.  Not everyone will agree with Cohen's ethical or poetic choices.  But her poems make valuable and necessary contributions to understanding significant consequences of medicine's ability to sustain us in states of chronic illness.