This Thing Called Poetry: An Anthology of Poems by Young Adults with Cancer – Edited by Kathleen Henderson Staudt Sponsored by the Brendan Ogg Memorial Fund

“Late summer, and the roses in second bloom, know what’s coming.”   Beauty and death mingle in this fine poem by Anya Krugovoy Silver, as they do in so many of the poems in this moving, accomplished anthology. Pain and anger often coexist with humor here, though not with self -pity.  If language can be redemptive for reader and/or writer, it certainly Is in these pages.

–Linda Pastan

The poetry in this collection fiercely bends along and speaks to the jagged shape of the suffering body. These poems give a bold and nuanced language to the trauma of illness and the fragile promise of wellness.

–Thomas Dooley, Poet in Residence, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital

In poems that are powerfully evocative of the physical and emotional complexities of living with cancer, this stunning gathering of poems embraces the wide-range of responses:    From fear and anger to curiosity, grief and gratitude for life.  They  invite us to step into the gray light of the cancer ward with its unknown worlds of hope and despair as we move down ”a corridor. . .   to a door “ where something uninvited has “written our name,” and  into a room that will leave us with “a tracery of scars.”    This room, paradoxically, helps us realize that we all live with life’s radical ambiguity and that at any moment we too might discover we have reached that unwanted marker of “before and after.”

–Michael Glaser,  Poet Laureate of Maryland 2004-9