Aphids in the Rose by Joan Baranow

Joan Baranow‘s poems are moving, beautifully crafted, filled with both fear and gratitude. She has a gift for choosing multi-layered images that reveal so much more that the few lines we read on the page. There are no wasted words, no too-easy emotions. I was swept along with her in her cancer journey, a journey no woman wishes to undertake. Her poems are a guide for others who find themselves unwillingly but courageously on that path.

–Cortney Davis, author of I Hear Their Voices Singing: Poems New & Selected

This collection of poems about a cancer patient’s journey vividly conjures the universal anxieties of the human condition as it confronts the simultaneous crises of bodily frailty and ecological precarity. Joan Baranow colorfully details the audacious cures in which we humans put our faith as we try to keep our worlds—inside and out—from falling apart. Modern medicine is at once celebrated and scrutinized in poems recognizing that scientific victories are as bruising as they are benevolent, that there is a cost to “force / assert[ing] its fact.” In looking to nature for answers, these poems bring to mind the Robert Frost of “Birches,” who would surely have approved of Baranow’s homage to a redwood tree’s dignified death: “that’s what I want,… / the full weight of gravity / pulling // with its fiery core, / whose hold never slips, / whose fist releases / such glossy, improbable leaves.”

–Jenna Le, MD, author of A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora

Breast cancer:  not a poetic subject, you think?  Think again. Step by step, with candor and clarity carrying us from diagnosis through surgery and radiation and beyond, to a world where even “the trees are trying to remember,” these marvelous poems are rich with Baranow’s trademark closeness to the natural world, her sensuousness, her gift for levity, her brilliant leaps of utterly apt metaphor, her self-acceptance—in a word, her humanity. This is a book every woman who has had—or might have—breast cancer, should read and cherish.

–Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light