Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Our Cancers: Poems

Our Cancers: Poems

O'Brien, Dan

Paperback

General Poetry

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ISBN10: 1946724424
ISBN13: 9781946724427
Publisher: Acre Books
Published: Sep 14 2021
Pages: 102
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.30 Width: 5.30 Depth: 8.20
Language: English
Poet and playwright Dan O'Brien chronicles the year and a half during which both he and his wife were treated for cancer.

On the fourteenth anniversary of 9/11--an event that caused their downtown apartment to become suffused with the World Trade Center's carcinogenic dust--Dan O'Brien's wife discovers a lump in her breast. Surgery and chemotherapy soon follow, and on the day of his wife's final infusion, O'Brien learns of his own diagnosis. He has colon cancer and will need to undergo his own intensive treatment over the next nine months.

Our Cancers is a compelling account of illness and commitment, of parenthood and partnership. This spare and powerful sequence creates an intimate mythology that seeks meaning in illness while also celebrating the resilience of sufferers, caregivers, and survivors.

As O'Brien explains in an introduction, The consecutiveness of our personal disasters, with a daughter not yet two years old at the start of it, was shattering and nearly silencing. At hospital bedsides, in hospital beds myself, and at home through the cyclical assaults of our therapies, these poems came to me in fragments, as if my unconscious were attempting to reassemble our lives, our identities and memories . . . as if I were in some sense learning how to speak again.

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