PRAISE:
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These poems listen for the moment when the body’s capacity to be a body falters or resumes. With care, Kincanon’s poems evoke the life-world of the one whose work it is to nurse, equally so: “Stepping over the threshold,/ I feel a tender swaying.” This instinct towards pendulation is carried through the collection, which alternates between the ward, and the plush liminality of the natural world. Transcribing, owl “hoots,” a “ridgeline” coyote glimpsed in the browning grass, the bright flash of a heron plucking a koi from the garden pond, the poet-nurse restores her own being, a form of soft attention that functions as an antidote, medicine in its own right.
–Bhanu Kapil
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Fragile Intersect, indeed! These poems straddle grittiness and gratefulness, blue sky and Code Blue, honeysuckle berries and the ICU, listening to birdsong and the heart’s faithful lub dub, lub dub. I love these poems that point equally to our mortality and to the great gift of life. Perceptive, compassionate, and lyrical, these are clear-eyed, open-hearted invitations to be as present and vulnerable in our lives as this remarkable nurse poet.
–Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Unfolding and host of The Poetic Path
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Fragile Intersect is a debut poetry collection that listens closely at the crossing of life and loss. Drawing on years as a poet and former cardiac nurse, Lynn Kincanon writes with a clear-eyed tenderness shaped by hospital rooms, mountain mornings, and the quiet urgencies that arrive when time feels finite. I love how these poems attend to crickets before the freeze, fog-draped moons, parting blessings, and the beauty we leave behind. With language that is compassionate but unsentimental, Fragile Intersect embodies what it means to live more mindfully and to count what matters. With sensory richness and surprising turns of thought, these moving poems stand at the intersection where mortality sharpens gratitude.
–Evan Oakley, M.A.,MFA Professor Emeritus. English, Communications, Literature Department Aims Community College.
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Lynn Kincanon has experienced the intersect of living and dying in a way that few of us have, or ever will. Thirty-six years spent in Emergency Rooms, ICUs, and cardiac surgery nursing have taught her to cherish life in all of its fearsome and fragile moments. These poems embrace the extremes of hospital halls where alarms ring constantly for attention and give honor to the quiet confessions of heart patients accepting that their next breath may be their last. Somehow, she finds a way to be kind to even the family members who refuse to let go and let their loved ones stop endlessly suffering when recovery is not possible. As an antidote to an ever-present atmosphere of life-and-death crisis, Lynn is a clear-minded island of calm. She is dubbed “The Electric Nurse” for her ability to always be there in time with the defibrillator paddles. She can literally shock a person back into life and still take the time to listen to the deepest longing, regrets, and wishes of heart patients facing their mortality. It is no surprise then that she becomes a fine gardener and observer of nature, saving katydids and wounded butterflies, placing a chunk of watermelon in her garden for the bees to suckle, while acquiescing to the harsh cycle of nature as a blue heron invades her pond to suck down her carefully nurtured koi. These extraordinary poems take us inside the halls of complex, throbbing hospitals, but mostly, they take us inside the heart of this fierce, tender, fearless and uncompromising poet. She gives us “the holy grail of the world, to love/and be loved, to praise the world, to love/ the world, to love yourself in the world.” She is a “pathfinder searching/ for whatever it is that will sustain.” Reach out and touch a beating heart with Lynn Kincanon, and like her, you will never be the same.
–Lorrie Wolfe, author of The Language of Crows, winner of the Fledge Chapbook Prize
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In Celtic traditions, Samhain is that leaf-turning time of year when veils between worlds are said to grow thin: light and dark, life and death. As an ICU and ER nurse and cardiac nurse practitioner, Lynn Kincanon lived in Samhain almost all the time, walking the night hallways, tending to the dying, the grievously ill, and those luckier souls fighting back towards the light. An archeologist of the liminal and flashpoints of human grace, she knows things that many of us do not. These emotionally powerful poems are reports from those shadowlands.
–John Calderazzo, Colorado State University Professor emeritus and author of In the Soup: Poems.
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Lynn Kincanon, the poet of Fragile Intersect, was a nurse for thirty-six years “because in the distant past death came knocking twice.” She senses a crucial time: “This morning, like the cricket, I feel an urgency.” She wants to have “That much desire, // … that much to praise” (from “Good Luck Morning”), the opening poem in this book. This collection of poems is both brilliant and moving. “An Ending and a Beginning,” about Kincanon’s father—“He forgets where he is, who we are.” He was once a prisoner of war. “He’s leaving us soon, we know this, and he is ready, already / talking to the moon, to his mother, to his sister, all dead years ago. / They’re calling him home. / He sees them flying across the room, asks us if we can see them / asks if we can hear them, and if we listen really hard / we can, we can.” In “Flying Lessons,” “The Blue Heron was showing me my next life / waiting for me to join her. // Today at the River’s Edge / She was teaching me to fly.” And “What Your Heart Says” is “this morning / as I lay my head on your chest in bed / and listened, I was remembering all the hearts, / all the times I was granted such grace… the murmurings of another human’s heart.”
–Veronica Patterson, poet of How to Make a Terrarium, Swan, What Shores?, Thresh & Hold, & it had rained, and Sudden White Fan. She was Loveland’s first Poet Laureate.
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Lynn Kincanon’s debut book of poetry, Fragile Intersect (Finishing Line Press), is a hymnal of human struggle singing with compassion. Based on her multiple decades as a nurse and nurse practitioner, the setting is the trauma room—emergency and ICU–and walking in the wild. Tough and tender patients are her subject. Kincanon brings us into their bodies and turns us toward our own.
–Beth Lechleitner, Loveland Poet Laureate 2025-2027
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