To See Yourself As You Vanish
eBook - ePub

To See Yourself As You Vanish

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

To See Yourself As You Vanish

About this book

Written in the last three years of her life, Andrea Werblin Reid's To See Yourself As You Vanish is a collection of unsparingly brave and insightful poems about her experience with ovarian cancer. Frank, fierce, and witty, her work does not hide behind cliches, platitudes, or tropes, but addresses the hopes, frustrations, fears, and longings that would be easy to leave unspoken. She offers friendship and understanding to those who share her experiences and powerful insights for caregivers and those who work in oncology, hospice, research, and psychology. Of these poems, Reid herself said: "I have struggled with the implications of war metaphors and the perspectives they perpetuate since receiving my own cancer diagnosis. People living with cancer and other chronic illnesses are not taking up arms, they are living as long and as humanely as possible: not to win or lose, simply to live." The scenes in these poems are rich and spare, magical and sane, awful and special: "one bird comes to the end of his branch looking like a clever moustache. /one bird comes to the end of his song like an ordinary bird."


[sample poem]

THE COLOR OF WAITING

is hypnotic pink, under whose spell
you've been living for years
like a small fossilized creature.
or magenta, a bruise
that evolves, so you must
continue to adjust your secrets
waiting is rosy, a soft-spun
medical soundtrack of static
frizz, machine screech
then sharp as the serrated smiles
doctors have been honing for years.
waiting masquerades as the inflatable idea
of hope, waterproofed for safety, maybe,
devoid of vision, punctured that easily

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Yes, you can access To See Yourself As You Vanish by Andrea Werblin Reid in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Social Science Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover 
  2. Half Title
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright Page
  5. Contents 
  6. Lifespan
  7. Distended
  8. Tugboat Captain
  9. Assurance
  10. Language Is a Virus
  11. Letter to a Torso
  12. The Color of Waiting
  13. A.K.A.
  14. Wolf Month
  15. Re-Treating
  16. Sorry Sorry
  17. Context
  18. The World of the Well
  19. Transformers
  20. Mental
  21. Driving While Grateful
  22. Betray
  23. Online Support Group
  24. Evidence for the Role of Mindfulness in Cancer
  25. Trying to Meditate
  26. The Wordlessness of Fixed Time & Simple Blessings
  27. Expectancy
  28. Stargazer
  29. Last Full Moon of the Year 2020
  30. Your Stupid Ignorant Beautiful Self in the Time Before Everything Happened
  31. At Least for Today
  32. The Flora, the Impossibility
  33. Patient
  34. Clinical Trial
  35. Rivals
  36. What Was That Game Called?
  37. Plain Okay
  38. Reckoning
  39. You Get No Extra Points for Making It through Your Morning Shower without Needing to Stop and Sit Down
  40. Insomnia
  41. Plan
  42. Things Disease Has to Teach
  43. You Say Late Like It’s a Bad Thing
  44. People Find It Difficult to Talk about Cancer
  45. Things I Don’t Know How to Talk about Anymore
  46. Charm
  47. Port, The Definition
  48. Snow Day
  49. When to Resign
  50. You Know How This Ends
  51. New Year’s Absolution
  52. Metastasis
  53. Spiders & Mars
  54. Walden
  55. Someone Else You Know Gets Cancer
  56. The Jeopardy of Your Thinking
  57. Appendages
  58. Kinds of Resistance
  59. Logical Disjunction
  60. How to Get Unstuck
  61. Once Upon a Ridiculous Couple of Years
  62. Keep Living
  63. People Speak of the Future
  64. Address
  65. Hereafter
  66. The Dazzling Odds
  67. How to Tell the Difference between a Raven, a Crow, and a Tired Body
  68. Compact
  69. When You’re Done
  70. Undertow
  71. Acknowledgments