Aphids in the Rose

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

Files

Aphids in the Rose

Find @ Dominican

Share

COinS