Taking Care of Time
Published on 1. March 2018
Book
Paperback/Softback
85 pages
978-1-61186-274-4 (ISBN)
Description
For poet and nurse practitioner Cortney Davis, the truth revealed through poetry is similar to what she has experienced in the heightened and urgent dramas that occur in health care-those suspended moments in which a dying heart might be revived or unbearable suffering relieved. We are vulnerable, her poems say, and we are dependent on one another-on the ways in which we care or fail to care for one another, in how we love or fail to love. In poems that are sensual, emotionally searing, and yet unfailingly tender, Davis shines a caregiver's light on the most intimate details of the human body and the spirit within-how the flesh might betray, how it endures, and how ultimately it triumphs.
Reviews / Votes
"How incredibly tactile, hands-on, and caring is Cortney Davis's new collection! In flawlessly crafted poems, both harrowing and celebrating, Davis keeps body contact as she walks us down hospital corridors, looking in on lives in extreme straits (but the looking is in no way off-putting, as too many "medical poems" can be). Why is what Davis relates here given to us as poems? Because the best poetry, like nursing, is focused, concentrated, does not run away or become maudlin, tries to note every important and essential detail, strips things to their essences, and strives for order. Hence, Taking Care of Time."-DICK ALLEN, author of Zen Master Poems and Connecticut State Poet Laureate Emeritus
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
East Lansing
United States
Publishing group
Michigan State University Press
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 224 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
136 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-61186-274-4 (9781611862744)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
CORTNEY DAVIS is a nurse practitioner and the author of Details of Flesh and Leopold's Maneuvers, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her honors include an NEA Poetry Fellowship; three Connecticut Commission on the Arts poetry grants; an Independent Publisher's Silver Medal; a Living Now Body Award; the Connecticut Center for the Book Award in Non-Fiction; an Independent Book Publishers Association's Benjamin Franklin Gold Medal in Body, Mind & Spirit; and four Book of the Year awards from the American Journal of Nursing.
Content
Contents
Part I.
Nursing 101
Selling Kisses at the Diner
Mornings We Rolled Pills into Fluted Cups
Surgical Rotation
The Nurse's First Autopsy
Apology to the Woman in Room 23
Stoned
Intubating the Corpse
Angel of Mercy
Falling Temperature
All Night, Lightning Flared Silently
Heroics
Teaching CPR
Women's Clinic
The Dark Marks
Hooked Up
Alchemy
The Circulating Nurse Enters the Operating Room
Waking
It Was a Good Year for Dreams
Part II.
Becoming the Patient
Part III.
The Ant's Reprieve
The Nurse's Pockets
A Patient Tells about Her Suffering
Diagnosis HIV
Follow-Up: Women's Clinic
Astronomy
I'm Afraid of the Brief Empty Space
Visiting the Lightning Struck
Distracted by Blackberries
On Call: Splenectomy
Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter
The Vocation of Illness
There Are No Poems at Hospital Management Meetings
Killing the Nurse in the House
I Want To Work in a Hospital
My Evidence
Twelve Thousand Years Ago
Hospice
Taking Care of Time
Finding What You Didn't Expect
First Night at the Cheap Hotel
The Snake Charmer
Author's Acknowledgments
Series Acknowledgments
Part I.
Nursing 101
Selling Kisses at the Diner
Mornings We Rolled Pills into Fluted Cups
Surgical Rotation
The Nurse's First Autopsy
Apology to the Woman in Room 23
Stoned
Intubating the Corpse
Angel of Mercy
Falling Temperature
All Night, Lightning Flared Silently
Heroics
Teaching CPR
Women's Clinic
The Dark Marks
Hooked Up
Alchemy
The Circulating Nurse Enters the Operating Room
Waking
It Was a Good Year for Dreams
Part II.
Becoming the Patient
Part III.
The Ant's Reprieve
The Nurse's Pockets
A Patient Tells about Her Suffering
Diagnosis HIV
Follow-Up: Women's Clinic
Astronomy
I'm Afraid of the Brief Empty Space
Visiting the Lightning Struck
Distracted by Blackberries
On Call: Splenectomy
Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter
The Vocation of Illness
There Are No Poems at Hospital Management Meetings
Killing the Nurse in the House
I Want To Work in a Hospital
My Evidence
Twelve Thousand Years Ago
Hospice
Taking Care of Time
Finding What You Didn't Expect
First Night at the Cheap Hotel
The Snake Charmer
Author's Acknowledgments
Series Acknowledgments