The Story of the Body: Poems of Illness & Recovery edited by Meghan O’Rourke
New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company
2026, 192 pages
ISBN 9781324105695
Your body speaks to you every moment of the day. In normal circumstances (good health), we hardly pay attention to those signals – the reassuring metronome-like steadiness of the radial pulse or the soft, regimented inhalations/expirations of respiration. But in bad times (illness and injury), we cannot ignore altered rhythms and abnormal emanations – the miserable throbbing of a migraine or wormlike twitching of the muscles of the hand. Megan O’Rourke, a poet and author of the superb memoir The Invisible Kingdom: Reimaging Chronic Illness (2022), has assembled a pensive and probing anthology of illness poetry that addresses altered states of the body. These 83 poems are organized into five sections: diagnosis, clinical encounters, caregiving, “metaphysical reckoning,” and recovery. A sense of betrayal by the body, shame, helplessness, isolation and loneliness, altered interpersonal relationships, and an inescapable confrontation with mortality are some common effects of illness expressed in these poems. Yet other poems communicate impressive fortitude, resiliency, revelation, receipt of compassion, and hope. Many notable writers are represented in the collection including Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Sylvia Plath, James Dickey, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Blake. In “lumpectomy eve,” Lucille Clifton eerily depicts the difficult night before scheduled breast surgery where a fear of loss is just one of many emotions felt. Ted Kooser’s “The Urine Specimen” combines imagery and whimsy about the excreted waste product (“the heat of this gold your body’s melted and poured out into a form”) with a bit of scientific prophecy (“for the doctor, who in it will read your future, wringing his hands”). “A Story About the Body” by Robert Hass is a prose poem skillfully and sorrowfully addressing infatuation and imperfection. A single poem cannot reliably rescue us from sickness or other misfortunes, but the best of them are certainly capable of offering connection, illumination, and comfort.
The Human Remains: Drawing Out Compassion in Medicine by Nathan A. Gray
University Park, PA: Graphic Mundi (an imprint of Penn State University Press)
2026, 256 pages
ISBN 9781637791059
The experience of gross anatomy lab in the first year of medical school has a heavy, haunting presence in this graphic memoir of medical education. Employing primarily grayscale art technique, author and illustrator Nathan Gray (a palliative care physician) holds nothing back in this sometimes grim recollection of his training. He describes the required dissection of a cadaver as “dismantling a human body” (p10) and worries about fainting or vomiting. He has recurrent macabre dreams of dancing with the cadaver. Gray begins having doubts as to whether he even belongs in medical school. Fortunately for him, one member of his dissection team provides a well-needed dose of humor and bravado. In his second year of medical school, Gray gets married. His third year clinical rotations start with the surgery clerkship where feelings of insecurity, uselessness, and fear pester him. Yet Gray is emotionally and psychologically aided by receiving small acts of kindness, his sustained wonder of the human body, and a genuine interest in the patients he treats. Upon completing medical school, he enters an internal medicine residency noteworthy for a strenuous schedule with nights on call and some shifts spanning more than 30 hours in the hospital. He labels residency training as “a cruel matchup that pitted our own sanity and survival against the needs of the people we cared for” (p170). Gray chooses a palliative care fellowship where his compassion and joy for practicing medicine are reinvigorated thus completing the arc of his journey infused with the humanity and empathy he originally began medical school with. The Human Remains is the second graphic medical memoir (See One, Do One, Teach One by Grace Farris is the other.) published in 2026. Both are cautionary tales (albeit with “happy endings”) reminding us that medical trainees are at high risk of having the most important things that propel them to choose to become a physician – compassion and service to others – gradually eroded.
“The News from Dublin” in The News from Dublin: Stories (pages 67-87) by Colm Tóibín
New York, NY: Scribner
2026, 289 pages
ISBN 9781476785141
[The story was first published in New Irish Short Stories.]
Maurice Webster, a teacher at a Catholic high school in Ireland, has good reason to worry about the condition of his youngest brother. Stephen has a severe case of highly infectious tuberculosis and is confined to home, (At the time this story takes place – prior to the wide availability of streptomycin in Europe around 1948 – there is no antibiotic treatment for TB.) Maurice is afraid to visit his brother and risk spreading TB to his wife and children. Reports surface of a promising new drug that can cure tuberculosis – Streptomycin. The antibiotic is almost impossible to obtain as it is still being tested and likely won’t be accessible for more than a year. Poor Stephen will not live long enough to receive the medication. Maurice travels to Dublin for a meeting with the minister of health in an attempt to procure Streptomycin for his brother. Although sympathetic, the health official says he is unable to help and recommends that Stephen be admitted to a sanatorium. A morose Maurice returns home understanding that Stephen and family were counting on him to retrieve the antibiotic. He has failed them. The only thing he has brought back from Dublin is bad news. With ever diminishing hope for his brother’s recovery, even a miracle seems out of the question. Maurice decides, “There had been enough prayers said, and they had made no difference” (p86). This compact, touching tale about the effect of serious illness on family members highlights their desperation and guilt, withering hope and reluctant resignation.
Web photo by Wes Hicks
