The Fiction of Stillness

Description

These poems evoke the author's focus on finding respite during breast cancer treatment and recovery - the physical touchstones carried into the chemo ward, the calming touch of her daughter, cherry juice to offset the loss of taste, and an ongoing retreat to a nearby porch. This dialogue with cancer seeks to dispel fear and offer remedy, including the promise of milagros (miracles), the body's visible and invisible medical tattoos, the echo of lingering animals in her bloodstream and a renewed understanding of stillness and healing.

Product Details

Price

$18.00 $16.74

Publisher

Saddle Road Press

Publish Date

July 15, 2024

Pages

Dimensions

6.0 X 9.0 X 0.17 inches | 0.25 pounds

Language

English

Type

Paperback

EAN/UPC

9798990054301

BISAC Categories:

Subjects & Themes - Death, Grief, Loss

Women Authors

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About the Author

Among her former lives, Robyn Hunt owned a small bookstore in the San Francisco Bay Area and ran printing presses with a print and design collective, producing bread-and-butter jobs to enable the creation of poetry books and broadsides. While on the West Coast, she read poems with a cadre of smart misfits on the steps of City Hall and in North Beach drinking establishments. She was arrested at least once while protesting at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. In the 1970s she attended San Francisco State University, studying Creative Writing during the early birth pangs of slam and language poetry. Returning more than 30 years ago to her native Santa Fe, she occupied a New Mexico legislative press box as a reporter, and hosted ongoing readings and other literary events in a bookstore on Old Santa Fe Trail.Her inaugural collection of poems, The Shape of Caught Water, was published in 2013 by Red Mountain Press and selected for award by the New Mexico Press Women's Association in 2014. Her other writing includes a one-act play, In Possibility: An Imaginary Correspondence, co-authored with Evangeline Brown and produced in Santa Fe by Theaterwork. Her work is also visible on her blog, As Mourning Doves Persist, and in various journals. She and her husband live in Santa Fe, where she works as a development and communications director for a nonprofit social services agency.

Reviews

"The Fiction of Stillness takes on 'the tangle of worst imagined tilt, ' tenderly moving us through many waiting rooms and the strung community of 'future survivors.' These poems light the way through danger-hair loss, nausea, scans-and ward off cancer with rituals, remedies, family lullabies and decisions. This book is a powerful reminder of the lavishness of being well, and how all we ever have is the present moment. As Hunt writes, 'Everyone is alive / this morning.'"

-Lauren Camp, New Mexico Poet Laureate 2022-2025, author of In Old Sky

"Everyone, including patients, caregivers and physicians should read this deep, healing and touching poetry."

-Olivier Rixe, MD, PhD, Caregiver, Professor of Medicine and Medical Oncology

"In The Fiction of Stillness, we find a compassionate and honest addition to the literature of illness and healing. Here is a map of the twisting road of cancer and its treatment, 'where soft tissue is knitted like worry stones' and where there is 'no turning back from future incisions.' This is a generous map that may guide and soothe those living with cancer, as well as those who care for them. And our compass rose: the poet's voice, 'itself an amulet and a ritual, ' lends words of truth, wit and celebration to this terrain. A landscape that is often painful and rocky, but also filled with self-discovery for those, like Hunt, who are brave enough to look."

-Katherine DiBella Seluja, RN PNP, author of Gather the Night and Point of Entry

Joshua Tree Authors