A single poem-- heart-rending, fearful, raging, beautiful, grotesque, even hilarious-- lets us know we're not alone in dealing with cancer. This was the idea that launched "The Cancer Poetry Project." Like the first volume, "The Cancer Poetry Project 2" drew more than 1,000 submissions from widely published poets, first-time poets and many poets in between. The resulting anthology features the best 140 poems, plus the story and the people behind each. Men, women and children. All walks of life. All types of cancer experiences. Readers will find comfort, understanding and much more in four chapters: Poems by Cancer Patients; Poems by Spouses, Partners, and Lovers; Poems by Family Members; and Poems by Friends and Health Advisors. Reviewers and readers call it powerful medicine.

Poems deal with mammograms, diagnosis, surgery, complications, recovery, and psychological implications of breast cancer.

This is the first critical study to offer a sustained analysis of the theme of cancer in contemporary poetry. In discussing works by major poets, including Paul Muldoon, Jo Shapcott and Christopher Reid, Cancer Poetry traces the complex ways in which poets represent cancer, and assesses how poetry can be instrumental to emotional recovery.

2023 Feathered Quill Book Awards Gold Medal Winner 2022 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) Gold Medal Winner 2022 Over the Rainbow Short List 2021 Goodreads Choice Awards - Best Poetry Book Finalist 2021 Bookshop's Indie Press Highlights You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson is a queer, political, and feminist collection guided by self-reflection. The poems range from close examination of the deeply personal to the vastness of the world, exploring the expansiveness of the human experience from love to illness, from space to climate change, and so much more in between. One of the most celebrated poets and performers of the last two decades, Andrea Gibson's trademark honesty and vulnerability are on full display in You Better Be Lightning, welcoming and inviting readers to be just as they are.

Please Come Off-Book queers the theatrical canon we all grew up with. Kantor critiques the treatment of queer figures and imagines a braver and bolder future that allows queer voices the agency over their own stories. Drawing upon elements of the Aristotelian dramatic structure and the Hero's Journey, Please Come Off-Book is both a love letter to and a scathing critique of American culture and the lenses we choose to see ourselves through.

Reverent and profane, entertaining and bruising, Four Reincarnations is a debut collection of poems that introduces an exciting new voice in American letters. When Max Ritvo was diagnosed with cancer at age sixteen, he became the chief war correspondent for his body. The poems of Four Reincarnations are dispatches from chemotherapy beds and hospitals and the loneliest spaces in the home. They are relentlessly embodied, communicating pain, violence, and loss. And yet they are also erotically, electrically attuned to possibility and desire, to “everything living / that won’t come with me / into this sunny afternoon.” Ritvo explores the prospect of death with singular sensitivity, but he is also a poet of life and of love—a cool-eyed assessor of mortality and a fervent champion for his body and its pleasures. Ritvo writes to his wife, ex­-lovers, therapists, fathers, and one mother. He finds something to love and something to lose in everything: Listerine PocketPak breath strips, Indian mythology, wool hats. But in these poems—from the humans that animate him to the inanimate hospital machines that remind him of death—it’s Ritvo’s vulnerable, aching pitch of intimacy that establishes him as one of our finest young poets.

Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. A Penguin Classic First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself on her own terms and offers her voice, grief, resistance, and courage to those dealing with their own diagnosis. Poetic and profoundly feminist, Lorde's testament gives visibility and strength to women with cancer to define themselves, and to transform their silence into language and action.