With echoes of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, an extraordinary debut collection from a prize-winning poet that chronicles a Black woman’s journey through disability, the byzantine healthcare system, life-giving, taking, and sacrifice.
With breathtaking lyricism and a vulnerability that pierces the heart, April Gibson journeys through the emotional abysses, the daily pleasures, the frustrations, and the joys of being a Black woman living with chronic illness.
Gibson offers a unique perspective on “the body,” viewing disability and healthcare through both feminist and socio-economic lenses filtered by race and faith. Through gorgeous sensory language that migrates memories, from carefree innocence to the ravages formed in its absence, Gibson bears witness to grief, courage, and resistance to redefine herself on her own terms.
Gibson presents her body as a “looking glass” that re-envisions illness, womanhood, motherhood, religious relics and collective loss through her physicality, through her lamenting, through her unearthing, reckoning and rebirth. Not only do we see her, but see the “we” in her. The Span of a Small Forever is both testimony and transformation—heart-shattering in its honesty, it ultimately offers us transcendent beauty, nourishment, and the strength we need to go on in our lives.
This unflinching memoir in verse explores:
- Disability and the Healthcare System: A raw, unflinching look at navigating a byzantine medical world, redefining illness on her own terms through the lenses of race, faith, and feminism.
- Motherhood and Chronic Illness: An intimate portrait of raising two sons while battling a debilitating disease, exploring the unique joys, frustrations, and sacrifices of motherhood.
- Body Image and Identity: Gibson presents her body as a "looking glass," a site of both grief and courage that bears witness to physical transformation and the powerful resistance of self-love.
- Lyrical and Unflinching Prose: A stunning collection of poems and lyrical essays that migrates through memory with gorgeous, sensory language—a testament to survival and transcendent beauty.