Book Title
Aphids in the Rose
Format
Book
Publication Year
2023
Publisher
Finishing Line Press
ISBN
979-8-88838-181-6
Description
This collection of poems about a cancer patient’s journey vividly conjures the universal anxieties of the human condition as it confronts the simultaneous crises of bodily frailty and ecological precarity. Joan Baranow colorfully details the audacious cures in which we humans put our faith as we try to keep our worlds—inside and out—from falling apart. Modern medicine is at once celebrated and scrutinized in poems recognizing that scientific victories are as bruising as they are benevolent, that there is a cost to “force / assert[ing] its fact.” In looking to nature for answers, these poems bring to mind the Robert Frost of “Birches,” who would surely have approved of Baranow’s homage to a redwood tree’s dignified death: “that’s what I want,… / the full weight of gravity / pulling // with its fiery core, / whose hold never slips, / whose fist releases / such glossy, improbable leaves.”
–Jenna Le, MD, author of A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora