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: Reimagining 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

The Secularization of Medicine: Ritual, Salvation, and Prophecy by Nathan Carlin 

New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2025, 264 pages 
ISBN 9780197574003 

Once upon a time, religion and medicine were quite close. Even now, parallels between the two are notable. Churches often have a spire pointing towards heaven. Modern medical centers are increasingly towering structures that reach to the sky. Churches have an altar, and hospitals contain operating tables. Clerics don distinctive vestments. Doctors have their own traditional attire – a white lab coat or scrub suit. Hearing a confession (whether in a hushed booth or a clinic exam room) is integral to both vocations. Some churches have holy water fonts for spiritual cleansing. Physician offices have readily available hand sanitizer. Carlin (an ordained Presbyterian minister and the Director of the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics at UTHealth Houston) explores the relationship between medicine and religion by focusing on secularization theory and the idea of transposition. His aim is to provide “a more critical understanding of the rituals, myths, and stories of and in medicine” (p20). In the book’s best section titled “Ritual,” the Hippocratic Oath (which invokes Greek gods) and the purpose of the White Coat Ceremony (a kind of “ordination”) are considered. “Salvation” examines the process of dying. A brief analysis of Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych” (preoccupied with the soul) and Roth’s Everyman (concentrating on the body) is included. Carlin also spotlights cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Denton Cooley and muses whether specialty physicians – surgeons, cardiologists, oncologists, psychiatrists – might be today’s “high priests”? “Prophecy” focuses on Stephen Bergman, MD (pen name Samuel Shem) and his novels including The House of God. Regardless of religious preference (or atheism), readers will find enlightenment in this intriguing inspection of the links between medicine and religion.
 

Every One Still Here: Stories by Liadan Ní Chuinn 

London: Granta, 2025, 160 pages 
ISBN 9781803513270 

The protagonists of these six short stories (largely set in Northern Ireland) have so many serious questions. But when they sometimes do get answers, the information is hardly good news. The narrator of “We All Go” is an empathetic teenager who has watched his wheelchair-bound father wasting away (probably from a neurodegenerative disease) and dying. He enrolls in a Human Anatomy class (perhaps to better understand his dad’s condition) but finds the lab itself and the required dissection disgusting. Other characters in these tales tend to be sympathetic, off-beat, or both: a psychic who isn’t adept at predicting the future but instead offers an effective form of psychotherapy, an unemployed woman taking night classes in creative writing who encounters a child (unaccompanied by parent or other adult) riding the same bus as her every week, a man who tries to commit suicide after learning his pet dog has metastatic cancer. Struggle, trauma, grieving, or some secret are prominently featured. A character wonders, “Isn’t the truth that we all do terrible things?” (p64). Indeed, acts of cruelty impact the lives of multiple individuals in these tales. For a few of them, compassion from others and the passage of time might ease the pain a bit but cannot completely erase it. 

Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night by Gethan Dick 

Dublin, Ireland: Tramp Press, 2025, 268 pages 
ISBN 9781915290168 

Long before the onset of Covid-19, Pandemic Lit was already an established subgenre of speculative fiction. For example, The Last Man by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was published in 1826. Like most novels about pandemics and other apocalyptic events, fear and hope are tightly intertwined in Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night. But this story’s journey thru the end of the world – about the things we leave behind and the qualities we stubbornly cling to – feels much more optimistic than most. An estimated 90% of the world’s population has expired, and a “raging sadness” has washed over most of the survivors. Details about the contagion are vague. The deaths it causes are devoid of drama or gore: “just a cold, a fever, some difficulty breathing, then no more breathing” (p236). Six people, afraid of being infected, hide in London for two months. Four of them decide to bicycle much of the way to an Edenesque-sounding town in France. The story’s narrator, Audaz is a young woman firmly tethered to memories of her younger life and her mother. She is also pregnant. Sarah, a retired midwife trains Audaz as her apprentice (since someone will have to know how to care for women’s health and deliver babies – if there is to be a future for humanity). Pressure Drop is a weed-smoking mystic, and Adi is a young man who succumbs to sepsis along the way. A variety of challenges test them throughout their trip. Survivors they encounter can be violent, suspicious, or kind. A fisherman transports the group in a borrowed boat across the English Channel to France where they eventually reach their destination. While survival remains their highest priority, these characters understand that compassion, resilience, and childbirth foreshadow a promising new beginning for them and perhaps the rest of the remaining world as well. 

Additional recommended new or soon-to-be published books in 2025: 

Seminal: On Sperm, Health, and Politics edited by Rene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, and Brian T. Nguyen  

Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy by Mary Roach 

Web image by  Rachael Ren