On one level, this is a book about cancer, specifically the poet’s multiple cancers caused by Lynch syndrome. And the poems do give a vivid picture of that life, with its “IVs, tubes, and gowns. . . night sweats, the pain scale and pre-dawn blood draws.” But what comes through the poems most forcefully is the poet’s love of her life, the impatience that makes her pull out hospital tubes, the drive to rejoin her family at home, to simply watch towels sway on the line and observe “the bumblebee vibrating in the rose.” The consciousness behind these poems is capacious, embracing graciously and joyfully “the life I’ve been given/ cancers and all/ for as long as I have.”
–Jane Hilberry, Professor, Department of English Colorado College, author of Body Painting (Red Hen Press)
A tendril is a spiraled stem, which climbs and attaches for added support and is an apt title for Gilbert’s poems, which enlighten her journey with Lynch Syndrome, a specific cancer mutation. These are poems without pathos, poems rooted in survival and love, poems of strength. Not only are Gilbert’s poems lovely in image and design, each is testament to being human, being strong and fragile at once.
–Karla Huston, author of A Theory of Lipstick, (Main Street Rag)
It’s remarkable how Sarah Gilbert’s poems in Tendril: Living with Lynch Syndrome can cut with the power and precision of the surgeon’s scalpel and yet be rich with tenderness and intimacy. “all of us are broken / mended, broken, mended / all of us carry scars” says Gilbert in her first poem, Outward and Visible Sign. Yes, each poem here reveals “a breath of grace.”
–Bruce Dethlefsen, Wisconsin Poet Laureate (2011-2012)
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
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