In this book full of pain and joy and raw honesty, Fleda Brown, poet and former poet laureate of Delaware, gives us a real-time account of her cancer diagnosis, chemo and radiation, from the doctor's phone call to the one-year, all-clear pronouncement.
Now everything's shifted. We pretend there's some solidity, some predictability. But being alive is more like riding a bicycle, balancing on two thin tires. Eventually we'll fall one way or the other, but for the moment, we're upright. It's exciting, sometimes frightening.
Brown's week to week accounts lead to the realization that one needs to face a wall-sometimes the wall of possible death-to see clearly. With great generosity, she allows the reader to come along through the darkness and the light.
Reading a poem by Brown is a lesson in how to read one's life, how each small thing, each seemingly casual detail, is in fact connected to perceptions and understandings of profound significance that we can all divine if only we calm our vision enough to fully experience the perishing present.
-World Literature Today
Brown's details [are] so invariably eloquent. . . . an observant woman with a grand heart, a penetrating mind, and not least, a keen wit.
-Sydney Lea
Fleda Brown has a good wit, a sharp eye, and a tough character.
-Dave Smith
Brown turns her considerable intelligence to examine art's persistence and contingency.
-Elizabeth Dodd, Miramar
Fleda Brown has such a wide ranging intelligence, such a large and quirky variety of subjects, and such facility with language. . .
- Linda Pastan
So perfectly tempered are the apprehensions of metaphor, so cunning are the felicities of form. . . we're tempted to think it's not art at all. Except for the radiance, which only art, and a generous mind, can make.
-Linda Gregerson