Thursday, May 14, 2015

Poetry of and About Cancer: Moira Linehan

Poet Moira Linehan will be reading this Saturday at 11:30 am at Market Block Books in Troy, New York.

Her poetry collection depicts her life as both a cancer caregiver and as a cancer patient. Her beautiful, elegant and honest poems began in her husband's last year of life and then continue into her own breast cancer diagnosis years later.

Here is the description of her new volume on Amazon:

After learning she has breast cancer, the poet struggles to live an examined life. Alienated and estranged from her own body, she turns her cancer into “these binoculars, / this new way of looking,” and uses it as a way of fixing herself firmly within the moment. As she travels Ireland and the Pacific Northwest, her busy mind moves from the knot in her breast to the knots in her knitting to the illuminated knots of The Book of Kells to the tossing, knotted surface of the sea; from the margins of her surgery—clean but not ideal—to the margins of illuminated manuscripts. She links the mundane to the mythic, intertwining connections between scripture and nature, storms and loss, winter and light, breast cancer and embroidery. As she returns to her home on a small pond in Massachusetts, she takes with her the fruits of her travels: the incarnate grace of the ordinary.  

No comments: