Product Description: In the summer of 2013, Cortney Davis, a nurse practitioner and author who often writes about her interactions with patients, underwent routine one­day surgery. A surgical mishap led to a series of life­altering and life­threatening complications, resulting in two prolonged hospital stays and a lengthy recovery...read more

In the venerable tradition of caregivers writing about the healing arts—a tradition peopled by the likes of Anton Chekhov, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, and Denise Levertov—Cortney Davis brings to poetry the experience, insight, and compassion of a nurse practitioner who daily confronts the unexpected frailties, passions, and power of the flesh.Taking the body as her text, Davis crafts her poetry from the pains of labor and the joys of birth, the depredations of disease and the sustaining hope of recovery. She trains her clear, unflinching gaze on the unfolding scene—a woman shipwrecked with a stranger; an adult reinventing childhood; an ill woman rediscovering pleasure in her body; a nurse realizing, in one harrowing instant, that she is as vulnerable as her patients—unerringly finding the particular image, the human detail, that connects reader, writer, and subject with the world. Primal, compelling, intelligent, these poems show us how to see as clearly as the poet does, with empathy and grace.

The collected poetry and prose of sixty-five nurses, representing men and women in a variety of medical fields, covers a wide range of subjects, from confronting mortality to empathy to the role of caregiver. Original. (Literature)

Drawing on her experiences working at a woman's health clinic, a nurse-practitioner offers a poetic and intimate study of the workings of the female body as seen through the lives of four patients as they deal with pregnancy and childbirth, illness and recovery, sexual dysfunction and sexual joy. Reprint.

Drawing on her experiences working at a woman's health clinic, a nurse-practitioner offers a poetic and intimate study of the workings of the female body as seen through the lives of four patients as they deal with pregnancy and childbirth, illness and recovery, sexual dysfunction and sexual joy. 30,000 first printing.

Product Description: Poetic exploration of caregiving, mortality, and illness from within the medical establishment. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)