Given Time: a mother-daughter cancer memoir by Christine Beck

Those of us who’ve lost a mother or beloved sister (as I have) to the ravages of breast cancer know that—unlike black olives—grief is not sweetened by soaking in the brine of memory and time. In Given Time, Christine Beck shows how grief remains a daily visitor—“my mother’s wallet, worn red leather. I’ve moved it from drawer / to drawer these forty years since she’s been dead, / as if one day she’d show up at my door / headed for the grocery.”

And beyond the missing, the mourning, and the memories lies something darker: fear that the genetic roots that bind us, that “seek each other beneath the earth,” will reawaken after years of quiescence, creating more grief, more illness, more loss. “What goes when flesh goes?” Beck ponders after she’s diagnosed with the same cancer that killed her mother. It’s more a matter of what arrives, she discovers: uncertainty and waiting.

–B. Fulton Jennes, author of FLOWN (Porkbelly Press, 2024)

As I read and reread the moving collection, Given Time: A Mother-Daughter Cancer Memoir,

I thought again and again of the photographer Dorthea Lange, who like Christine Beck, does not crop the ragged edge off truth. These are not poems to be skimmed over, forgetting the last while reading the next.

Grounded in the flesh, the scar that runs like a ragged river across her mother’s chest, the cumulative impact of poems that explore the emotional and physical impact of breast cancer are meditations on facing death combined with a somber awareness that even when there is none, the living need hope. Visceral yet spiritual, poems cross out of the ordinary into a lyrical place containing light and dark and “embrace the hidden thorns/just beneath the blooms.”

Given time, memory turns, like olives “their bitter taste stripped out by salt and time.”

Given Time asks a question without an answer, “How can you shield your heart?” What will endure, like this powerful collection of poems, is the will to live, to find joy that beats within each human heart.

–Vivian Shipley, Author of Slow Dancing with the Dark (2024, Louisiana Literature Press, SLU) and Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor